Tag: AIGA

Why Branding + Interior Studio The Strangely Good Judge a Place by Its Toilet + Other Design Lessons

The toilet is the last place you expect to see on a studio visit. But that’s one of the first things Michelle Lin points out after I stepped into the office of Singapore branding studio The Strangely Good.

Taking a bathroom break here is to board a train carriage inspired byThe Darjeeling Limited. Like the set in Wes Anderson’s film, The Strangely Good toilet is plastered with Art Nouveau wallpaper and floor tiles, as well as a window to another world—the perfect getaway for the graphic designer who confesses to dreaming up ideas while handling her other business. This interior also weirdly epitomizes the work and design philosophy of The Strangely Good.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design 

How the “Type Geeks“ of Malaysia are Using Typography to Change Sexist Chinese Language

After learning how sexist the Chinese language is, designers Tan Sueh Li and Karmen Hui put their typography skills to use. The two Malaysian women, better known as TypoKaki, designed new Chinese characters incorporating the radical for woman (女, pronounced “nu”) to redefine the traditional patriarchal language for the country’s modern women.

Take, for instance, the typical Chinese character for peace (安), which depicts a woman (女) who stays within the house by covering it with a top radical (宀). To express how women in Malaysia are often segregated in public spaces because of Islam, the duo hacked the Chinese character for space (间) to insert the radical for a woman instead.

 This is just one of 30 characters Li and Hui designed for Women’s Words, a tiny red dictionary created with fellow Malaysian writer and researcher Tan Zi Hao. Created for a feminist art event in Malaysia, it’s just one example of how TypoKaki has been using typography and design to explore Malaysian culture since 2012.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design 

One Graphic Designer Challenges Viewers By Not Showing Any Work at His Retrospective

At the mid-career retrospective of graphic designer Hanson Ho last month, visitors might have been surprised to see not a single piece of work he created in the past 16 years.

Instead, the gallery walls were adorned with a salmon-colored semi-circle, a grey square, and framed black rectangles, amongst other simple shapes. These are the building blocks of the elemental and modernist creations by the Singaporean designer, better known as the founder of H55 studio. When Ho thought about looking back at the output of the studio he founded in 1999, he decided to pay homage to the aesthetic fundamentals of his practice instead of staging a “meaningless” show-and-tell exhibition.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design