The short stories by Aaf van Essen, written during her various stays at Xiamen, China, are beautiful miniatures.
For these texts I made a booklet like a little treasure – high quality paper, sophisticated typography and colourful graphics. The reader/viewer can evoke his/her own inner images by turning the pages. Together with the dedicated printing studio Lenoir Schuring we used the printing press as a brush.

Colour is dangerous. Colour is a drug, a delirium, a madness. Colour is ant-intellectual, color is subversive. Colour is vulgar, color is elusive, colour is
female.
Colour largely evades schematic and verbal systems. Line, shape and conception determine the rule of the high art. Colour is often dismissed as superficial and decorative.
Whereas it is in colour precisely where enormous freedom, autonomy and expressiveness can be found. People who don’t fit well into a system are often described as ‘colourful figures’. The independence of color is a universal force, indeed.

The graphics visualizes Picassos quote…

“lesser artist borrow; great artist steal.”

studioWMW team up with ibakery, a social enterprise bakery, employs people with different abilities to produce the best quality bakery. To develop the cookie packaging for one of the oldest temples in hong kong — Man Mo Temple to celebrate the traditional Autumn Sacrificial Rites. We hope our precious traditions can be preserved and endured into the new generations with modern and meaningful design.

Bit by bit, bite by bite, to make a difference.

It is straight if it looks straight. Balanced when it feels like it. Period.

Hi! It’s me. Your friend, remember? Just checking up on you. How are you? I hope you’re doing well and staying safe. Hope to see you soon. Keep in touch. Bye now.

Ginger Muse connects local musicians from various disciplines, records our voices in-studio and develops our city’s unique local music label.

We developed a visual system with a dynamic response for different occupations to echo musicians & music directions’ multi-face. The bold graphic execution captures the city vibe and brings it to the international spotlight.

The design depicts the inner emotions of the artist. Through looking at herself in the mirror, she makes a real breakthrough beyond her boundary, stepping up from the cage, and a journey of self-discovery is found. Her ideas and emotions are expressed in the works of mirror art.

Set loose, Joyce’s debut is a search for her own identity. Setting loose implies letting go of the restrictions and defying the rules one has created for oneself, whether they stem from society’s expectations or a need to survive in strong competition. In this trying time, Joyce channels her complex emotions into notes and rhythms that offer the audience a glimpse of her soul.

We believe in design beyond possibility. Does the beauty and tradition of red packet have to be ‘red’? We want to break conventions, by applying an innovative approach to tradition for steering towards a creative future.

‘Gift for your Beloved’ is a unique gift idea for all occasions. With 24 designs that uses up to 18 kinds of quality paper matching with the 10+ finest printing effects, it conveys our best wishes in the new year — opening the gift box to unveil the surprise and joy. Through creative planning, we hope to show the power of design as a way to endure a fading culture.

» blau bleibt krau und brau kleibt blei« refers to a well-known German tongue twister. I purposefully twisted the words in a Dadaistic way. As you will easily guess, it is about the colour blue – and about the slippery of meanings of words and perceptions.

I am sorry, I cannot think of any possibility to translate this into English!

These coloured sheets are used to calibrate printing machines. The gradients and lines are scanned allowing the machines to be optimized accordingly. The functional aesthetic of these sheets, which are seen as purely functional and are thrown away by the hundreds after use, have always fascinated me! Initially I had only planned on printing onto the sheets, but within the process I was given the opportunity to incorporate some elements of my own. Subsequently a final layer was printed, after the machines had been successfully calibrated. The negative form of the dog brings out the colorful elements and the final result is great advertising for the printers and myself. Classic Upcycling!

During the pandemic freedom is restrained. Our apartments became spaces where we are cloistered. A film festival like Black Movie which has a diverse, multicultural and international program, can be an escape. When you don’t travel anymore, when you are restrained, cinema can become more than ever a second reality with endless possibilities. In this poster we illustrated this other infinite reality: buildings which are nailed to the ground, in black and white, with immense, vibrant and surreal sky that opens itself above them.

The gold of his hair, the heaven of his eyes, the roze of his skin, and the honey of his beard: my personal interpretation of the concept of “the Other” using color as a medium between the subjective world of sensation and the objective world of fact.

goud hemel roze honing a portrait of my Dutch husband, 2014, series of 10, 187 cm x 93,5 cm each, inkjet print on mat paper

The poster honors Ivan Chermayeff and visualizes his famous quote.

“I prefer scissors to brushes.”

PLAY(ing) with type

It’s nice to know you’re not alone. Our colorful demons are always on our side and bring hope and courage, even in dark times. The unknown girl lets them out, when she needs to and brings light into the chaos.

Every year we start our first meeting with the Flaam festival team with a question – what can we do differently than everyone else? In 2019 we stretched this idea into the whole identity. Looking at line-ups of all the huge festivals with their vaguely edited photos of each artist, we came up with an idea to create completely new, custom visuals for our artists that resulted into a series of 22 avatars, each representing the individual artist’s name, mood or vibe while retaining a single style. The avatars were implemented across all the visual applications such as the website, merchandise or tickets.

This work explores the innate qualities of the letterforms in the word “color,” while utilizing a rainbow effect to carry the reader inward. The composition resolves in “r” for red.

Biological designs, far from realistic nature. Cyberplants are visual explorations of biology and technology. A future version of botany that is alive and has capabilities. A tribute to the beauty and diversity of nature, with the question of what potentials could be in the future of biology. Animated posters: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/444685803

The „Rana Series #1—5“ is a print series of five risography prints. These are part of the project called „Evolution Of Shape“. This project is an artistic visual research by Bollo. It is a collection of forms, shapes, objects, visual experiments, random stuff, accidents and visual spectacle.
The prints are designed in three or four layered colors: blue, bright red, green, fluorescent pink, yellow and black.

The poster was designed for the famous International Comic Festival Fumetto Lucerne. It is one of the most important platform for comic artists all over the world. Out of the visual vocabulary of the comic, C2F has developed picture elements that are combined playfully and changeable with the pictures of the artists. The graphically reduced spatiality refers directly to the festival: the comic leaves its usual format, the magazine or book, and is restaged in the room. For this poster, they choosed artworks from Keiichi Tanaami and sampled them together.

Poster design, digital drawing, 30x40cm: ¡A las Barricadas! is a call to action and the anthem of spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War against Franco. It still is the anthem of the anarcho-syndicalist union. In my work I concentrate on explaining anarchism as for most people anarchy means only chaos but of course there is more to anarchism and anarchy than that.