Tag: AIGA

Saved by Graphic Design, One Failing Student Discovers His Calling

Shannon Lim hated studying until he discovered design

A zine created by Lim and Danielle Ng to critique consumerism in Singapore.

If not for design, Shannon Lim may still be bumming around in life. He never did his homework in school and spent his time skateboarding instead, until he set his mind on becoming a photographer. But in order to get into one of Singapore’s top design schools where photography is also taught, Lim realized he needed good grades.

“It was an epiphany,” he recalls. “I really was a very bad student. I would sleep in class the whole day. For my chemistry paper, I wrote ‘bunsen burner’ for all the questions.” Even though it was a struggle to pass his exams, Lim did well enough to study photography at Temasek Design School. That was when he made his second epiphany in life: that he wanted to be a graphic designer instead.

➜ Read the full story in AIGA’s Eye on Design

Saving Indonesia’s Graphic Design History Before It’s Lost Forever

One group is on a mission to open the country’s first design museum 

A propaganda poster created when Indonesia was occupied by the Japanese during the second World War. COURTESY OF DGI

As Indonesia was liberated from an authoritarian regime over a decade ago, a democratic government emerged—and so did a graphic design archive.

In 2003, the Southeast Asian nation was recovering from a recession and was on the cusp of holding its first direct presidential elections when Hanny Kardinata started an electronic mailing list to share his notes and artifacts on Indonesia’s graphic design past. This casual conversation with fellow designers Henricus Kusbiantoro and the late Priyanto Sunarto blossomed under the country’s more permissive climate, growing into a community that was formalized in 2007 as the Desain Grafis Indonesia (DGI).

➜ Read the full story in AIGA’s Eye on Design

Russia’s First Design Museum is Racing to Preserve its Greatest Soviet-era Treasures

Discarded financial documents, burnt archives at dachas [countryside houses], and metal closets missing keys for more than a decade. A Russian spy drama? It’s actually the true story behind the building of the Moscow Design Museum’s archive.

The institution, founded by two graphic designers, a journalist, and an architect (Alexander Sankova, Stephen Lukyanov, Nadezhda Bakuradze, and Valery Patkonen) has been racing against time to recover the quickly disappearing artifacts of Soviet design history. For a period that stretches from the 1920s to the dissolution of the union seven decades later, this means sifting through what has become discarded as junk and tracking down elderly designers who are surprised to be remembered at all.

“When we started collecting Soviet design artifacts, many designers cried out, ‘Where were you two months ago? I’ve just burned all my archives at dacha!’” explains Sankova over an e-mail interview. “They couldn’t believe that someone would ever want their archives for the museum.”

➜ Read the rest in AIGA’s Eye on Design