Hello, and welcome to Design Diary, a collection of five projects from across the world that have impressed us this week.
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Archivo, the Mexico City-based archive dedicated to showcasing the city’s industrial and architectural design history, has recently launched a new website. When we spoke to them back in June, the site was still in the works—the latest component to an effort to organize the space’s expansive and interdisciplinary work under one graphic identity. Alejandro Olávarri, Archivo’s assistant curator and in-house graphic designer, told us at the time that the website is designed to reflect the flexible nature of the space itself, which serves alternately as an exhibition space, library, archive, and reading room. “The [website] navigation is so random, but that’s also how you navigate the space,” Olávarri said. “We wanted to challenge the typical linear navigation of an institution website.”
And now the website is up, in all its glory. It’s a labyrinthine journey through all of the archive’s various functions: a homepage of overlapping shapes lead to various sections for publishing, events, research, etc. Clicking into a section labeled “Space” brings up photos of the building, the archive, and the shop; “Rethinking” guides users through publishing and event projects. It’s a clever and eye-catching way to display a large backlog of information and past works, all while effectively communicating what the archive does. Check it out here.
When we’ve covered Brooklyn-based studio Anton & Irene on the site before, it’s been for its eye-catching UX design. Now the pair are releasing their first physical product: the lovely, award-winning NU:RO, available for pre-order on Kickstarter. The minimal watch has a black hourglass at its center, with two numbered, rotating dials. As they turn, the numbers inside of the hourglass show the current time. NU:RO already won the Red Dot award for best concept, and now that it’s real it’s very much living up to the hype.
London foundry Fontsmith has been around for 20 years this year, and to celebrate it has published a book of all 500 typefaces launched over that time. The book is billed as a “definitive guide to the Fontsmith library,” with each of the entries offering detail and backstory about the fonts. We’re partial to the DayGlo orange pages throughout, but there’s lots of lovely stuff in there; keep it by your desk side.
The digital design collective Universal Everything has long been making videos and immersive multi-sensory experiences for exhibitions and brands. Now the studio has a solo show of its own, Fluid Bodies, up at Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul. The exhibition explores the studio’s “fascination with the human form—the characteristics of the individual and its behavior as part of a larger collective,” through a series of video works.
The video Tribes, for example, shows an aerial view of an ever-changing mass of people, converging and diverging in a series of patterns that demonstrate how people move in sync in a shared environment. Walking City alludes to the utopian visions of 1960s architecture practice Archigram with a nomadic city that “adapts her movement and form to the environments she encounters.” The studio’s whole back catalog of motion graphics is worth exploring—most of them are available on their website. But if you happen to be in Istanbul, we recommend you go watch them in the striking Borusan Contemporary, which is housed in a building locally referred to as the “haunted mansion.”
And finally, the designers at Zwupp sent along some nice new work for Forward Festival 2018, an event that brings together creative industry folks across Vienna, Munich, and Hamburg. The identity plays with the festival theme of “construct-deconstruct” with a ripped-paper aesthetic, repetitive type, and a pastel color palette.
