Selected
Works

Fia Backström’s exhibition in Venice centers around nationality and national representation and consists of ten sculptures spread out around the Giardini together with accompanied audio guides.

Inspired by the venetian printer Aldus Manutius, generic fine art catalogues, stock photo websites, corporate graphics and movie closing credits, we designed a catalogue together with Fia to extend and contextualize her physical work.

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  The cover is graced by the lion of Gripsholms slott that was stuffed in 1731 by a taxidermist who had never seen a lion.

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  Powerpoint by Goldin + Senneby.

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  Essays by Cecilia Widenheim Tim Griffin and Magnus af Petersens with retrospective images of Fias work.

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Since the start in 2007 PSL has grown from a simple blog with a staff of one, to the base for a wide range of music related projects and an ambitious website, now involving a full editorial staff. Having reached the limits of the old blog format, we were asked to both oversee a redesign and visually update the old identity.

Based on the previous visual language, we introduced a slightly reduced color palette and a custom made typeface in two versions. A colon was added to the previous logotype and is used as a unifying typographical mark to emphasize the ‘introducing’ character of the blogs.

blogg.svt.se/psl

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  Two custom designed versions of Futura are used;one using outlines of selected typographic details, and one filled in that automatically is displayed when the mouse hovers the outlined typeface.

Copypastecharacter.com gathers hard to find characters in a few categories and makes them available with a simple click, ready to be pasted into emails, tweets and text messages.

In collaboration with Martin Ström.

www.copypastecharacter.com

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  The users can easily create their own sets of favorite characters.

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BAC is the abbreviation of Baltic Art Center, a Swedish cultural institution on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. During the last few years the organization has undergone a transformation from a traditional residency and exhibition space to a more flexible and dynamic art production office. A redesign was commissioned to visualize this change.

Based on BAC’s former typographical framework — a typeface originally found on the facade of the previous exhibition space — we extended the identity typeface family with three new weights and a randomized treatment playing with the idea of a dynamic institution in constant change.

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  Business cards, letterpress printed by Norrbacka Tryckeri.

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  The website randomly changes all headline and logo typography, as well as shifts through three selected background colors.

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‘48 timmar – konsten att hålla öppet’ (48 hours — the art of keeping open) was a week-long workshop at the Swedish Museum of Architecture, aiming at opening the museum up for its visitors; both literally and in a wider sense.

In collaboration with furniture designer Fredrik Paulsen, we designed the identity and signage system based on the common ‘kiosk flag’; a plastic flag usually hung up by small shops owners to show that they are open for business.

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  The participants — as well as the visitors — were invited to sit down, draw or type on a flag and attach it to one of the flag poles spread out around the space.

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  During extended opening hours and without the usual entrance fee, visitors were invited to take part in several ongoing investigations and discussions about possible directions on architecture and design, hosted by smaller independent practices within art, design and crafts.

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  We also designed the website, which worked as part real-time blog and part documentation tool.

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  Webflyer

Future Exhibitions No. 1 (2009) is centered around the impact of technology on the exhibition world. It is set using headline typefaces downloaded from the online collaborative font creation tool and community FontStruct, as a response to recurring discussions in the publication about amateurism, participation and open source in the context of the museum.

Future Exhibitions No. 2 ‘Spactial Encounters’ (2010) might be described as the older sibling of the previous publication. As a reference to the theme and with a little help of Fontlab, Robofab and Python scripting, we created a custom made weight of Futura Shadow for each of the 11 articles, resulting in an animated headline font that slowly shift perspective through the publication.

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  Future Exhibitions No. 1

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  Portraits made with the help of Jonathan Puckeys ‘Delaunay Raster’ Scriptographer tool.

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  Illustrations by Alexandra Falagara.

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  Future Exhibitions No. 2

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  Portraits made with the help of Jürg Lehni’s Scriptographer raster tool.

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Graphic identity for Småland based lightning manufacturer Örsjö Belysning, locally producing lamps designed by Matti Klenell, Wis Design, Elisabeth Henriksson and others.

In 2007 the editors of SITE decided to abandon its bilingual form and publish the journal exclusively in English. With the characteristics of the former SITE in mind, we designed the new format with more white space, an openness towards the use of imagery and updated typography.
Based on the journal’s name, concept and Swedish origin, the typeface SITE Specific — with clear references to Tratex (the typeface used on all Swedish road signs) — was designed for use in headlines and image captions.

In late 2011 a second re-design was commissioned, in order to meet new economical and practical requirements for the publication. The new version of SITE is published biannually and is printed on demand by Lightning Source.

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  Six of the ten issues designed between 2007 and 2010, in the folded down A4 format.

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  Starting with issue 31–32 (2012), a new format was introduced; the ‘Royal book’ size 234×256mm.

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  The custom designed typeface Site Specific.

Nevertheless, Faith in the Air was written by curator Diana Kaur and art historian Padraic E Moore during a collaboration between CuratorLab at Konstfack and The Studio at Moderna Museet. It consists of seven texts in which the authors look at spiritual and religious aspects of iconic pieces of modern art.

The pamphlet is designed with references to theories on divinity in form, such as the Fibonacci number sequence and the Golden ratio, and is set in an early version of our own first serif typeface; Småländsk Antikva.

Curator Laurel Ptak invited 14 internet artists, blogs and surf clubs to each come and do a 4-hour residency inside the space of the gallery. The event attempted to explore how the distribution, production, analysis, and consumption of culture rapidly are evolving in an online context.

Inspired by the ambiguous nature of the exhibition, and its aim to explore the blurred border between the physical and the digital, we designed the webpage and the catalogue as one and the same thing, using CSS technology only. The website was designed to fit the format of the newsprint catalogue and the catalogue was simply created by generating a printer file straight from the web browser.

www.letsmeetinreallife.com

Portraits by Daniel Norrby.

Traditional newspapers come out once or twice a day after having come to a final publishable version. With online news there is never a final version, as news is always in flux and can be edited at any time.

With Zeitgeist we wanted to show this evolution by bringing it back to a traditional newspaper format. Using different design treatments we created a number of articles looking at characteristics of online news.

Zeitgeist was awarded the Items/Spinhex & Industrieprijs 2006, in Items Magazine and a Silver at the Kolla Award 2007.

Collaboration with Jonathan Puckey.

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  ‘Wikinews.org article evolving’ — An article on the death of Milosevic is shown evolving from a tiny story to a detailed account over the course of eight days. Wikinews is a collaborative online news site which allows anyone to add or edit news stories.

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  ‘UN Member states admit, deny & accuse’ — A Google News search for headlines that include the names of the UN members states in combination with the verbs ‘admit’, ‘deny’ and ‘accuse’. When there are results an article is created out of these headlines.

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  ‘News feed publishing rhythms’ — Using RSS we recorded the history of what headlines were published and when during a 24 hour period of different news sources. By placing the headlines vertically according to the time they were published we created a kind of DNA fingerprint for every source.
  ‘Iran’s actions’ — Headlines containing the word ‘Iran’ in combination with different verbs such as ‘promises’, ‘offers’, ‘accuses’, ‘seeks’ etc. These lists of headlines are ordered by number of results. Between 27 april and 26 may Iran admitted the least and warned the most.

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  ‘A story told in headlines’ — An analysis of two days worth of headlines from different sources about one story. This treatment was inspired by how online news sources are beginning to optimize their headlines for search engines such as Google. For this article we generated 123 weights of one font. Every time a word is used again the word is made lighter by one weight. This way unoriginal headlines slowly disappear (old news) and new unused words are bold.

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  ‘Foxnews.com Top Story’ — We recorded the front page of Foxnews.com for 24 hours and extracted the changes happening to their front page article. Deletions are shown with red strikethroughs and additions are inverted.

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The exhibition, with the subtitle Knowhow, challenged the participants to cast aside artist-, designer- and producer-centred approaches by offering the visitors an opportunity to re-create the exhibited work themselves. The artists were requested to submit a work as well as instructions on how to create the object. Both the instruction and the sample work were put on display in the exhibition.

In collaboration with Risto Kalmre we designed the visual identity with a logotype that both worked as a recognizable mark and as source for typographic ornaments by revealing its construction and different parts.

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  The A4 sized catalogue consists of the scanned instructions together with essays and exhibition information inserted as eight page sections on glossy paper throughout the publication.

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  Posters sampling verbs from selected instructions.

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The book centers around Annas interests in crowds and consists of a wide range of commissioned texts from art critics, philosophers and poets, separated by sections of reproductions of Annas visual work.

When asked to exhibit at the small konsthall in Sandviken for four weeks in 2007, we saw an opportunity to reflect on our first six months of running a graphic design studio.

In conversation with five graphic designers, all at different stages in their careers and from different backgrounds, we talked about how to make decisions in our practices and collected transcripts of these conversations in a book. We also exhibited the poster series ‘Vertikal centrering’, that visualized three different ways of making design decisions.

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  The posters worked both as part of the exhibition, and folded down to be mailed as the invitation.

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  The poster series ‘Vertikal centrering’ (Vertical alignment) contained three posters showing different ways of placing text on a sheet: ‘Människa’ (Human) — what subjectively looked good to us, ‘Natur’ (Nature) — based on the Golden Ratio and ‘Teknik’ (Technique/Technology) — what is the mathemetical (50%) middle of the sheet.

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  The talks where collected in the book ‘Att välja – Fyra samtal om grafisk design’ (To Choose — four talks on graphic design), made in 20 different colored versions.

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  The talks with Martin Frostner, Henrik Nygren, Jens Schildt and Andreas och Fredrika all had different layout, based on the nature of each talk.

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The publication consists of two interviews with Dutch experimental architects MVRDV: one with visionary theorist Winy Maas and one with the two more formalistic partners, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Both interviews run parallel throughout the magazine but differ in terms of paper and printing technique based on the characteristics of each talk. The images are treated in absolute relation to the text, to reflect MVRDV’s fascination with data and statistics.

Nothing is Left to Tell (2012) and The Rest is Silence (2009) are books on projects connected to artist Emanuel Almborg, published by Andperseand.

Klubb:Europa was initiated by Goethe-Institut Schweden and the German Embassy as a way of introducing selected European DJs to the Swedish club scene.

The identity is based on onomatopoeic descriptions of sounds in club environments, collected through an online survey we set up with people from the participating countries.

‘Is it Possible to Make a Photograph of New Jersey Regardless of Where you are in the World?’ was the title of a photo exhibition at the Pierro Gallery in New Jersey curated by Laurel Ptak, raising questions on how the internet and globalization has changed our idea of place.

The layout of the catalogue and the website is inspired by the way search engines deal with visual content — images are treated without respect for visual qualities and are instead arranged based on meta data.

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  The title is set using the typeface Alternate Gothic No. 2 designed by New Jersey native Morris Fuller Benton.

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  The cover, back and fold-ins works as a world map, showing from where in the world every submission comes.

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The series contains shorter essays, collections of articles and republishings of older texts on art, philosophy and architecture.

The creative freedom of publishing online is not only appreciated by writers — the same attitude can also be found among typographers and type designers. The demands on a finished, commercial typeface are however very high and many digital experiments never leave the screen. To give these unfinished typefaces a (new) life, we dedicated the covers of the Excerpt series to them, by engaging in conversations with type designers on typefaces they never finished. Every new cover features an unpublished typeface from a different type designer.

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  Typefaces from left to right: Aurora Neu, Garnitur II by Konst & Teknik (2007), Experimental 63 by Hannes Rydell & Nils Jarlsbo (2008), Toronto by Susan Kare & Jonas Williamsson (1983/2003), Regina by Eva Wilsson (2011) and Extencil by Göran Söderström (2011).

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