Tag: Singapore Design

A Generations-old Bookbinder Gets a Modern Makeover

A bookbinder—a craftsman who hand-folds, hand-sews, and hand-cuts books—is a dream client for many graphic designers. It’s no wonder creative agency &Larry were excited to work on the rebranding for Bynd Artisan, a new atelier set up by stationery and leather craft goods manufacturer Grandluxe to promote the craft of bookbinding in Singapore.

Despite the client’s wealth of heritage and tradition (they go back three generations), &Larry was careful not to historicize the subject for the contemporary audience. Instead, creative director Larry Peh and his team went the modern and elegant aesthetic, a signature style of &Larry that has won the decade-old studio much acclaim, including most recently, Singapore’s President’s Design Award Designer of the Year in 2014.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

The Godfather of Singapore Graphic Design Makes Another Crazy Cool Magazine

Theseus Chan: the name may not inspire awe in the States, but in Singapore he’s known to many as the godfather of graphic design, a reputation he’s earned with a body of work that continues to challenge his peers and excite a younger generation. None of his projects shows this better than WERK, a self-published magazine Chan started in 2000 to experiment with design production. The covers are torn and spray painted, or patched together from the detritus of the production process itself. Pages are made out of cloth, laboriously die-cut, or stained with printer’s inks and oils to evoke the scent of printing. The result is more than a magazine; each issue is an object that echoes the postmodern, “New Wave” tradition, an expressive and anarchic response to Swiss modernism.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Singapore’s Anonymous Design Studio on How to Survive in Business: Realllly Try

Instant noodles are a key ingredient in the decade-long story of communication design studio Anonymous. It kept founders Felix Ng and Germaine Chong alive for a week while they waited for clients to pay their bills. But even before that low point in their early design days, instant noodles imparted a key lesson in design for the fledgling Singapore studio.

On their first-ever trip to Tokyo, Ng and Chong were astonished by the packaging design for some dry instant noodles they saw at a convenience store. Typically these bowls have just one opening for pouring hot water both in and out to cook the noodles, requiring an awkward balance to keep the noodles in. But the Japanese package had a separate perforated opening just for draining out the water.

It seems simple enough, but this was a revelation for Ng. “Very often, what we create as designers is invisible. It’s there. It helps make my life easier, but you don’t even realize it’s there,” he said in a Skype interview. “I want to do work that, in a way, is slightly invisible but has a point to it.” (Inspiration for their studio name, perhaps?)

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design