Space Trash Signs

Have you ever thought about space debris? When I stumbled upon the Space Trash Signs project, I became quite intrigued. There are over 160 million pieces of human-made space debris in Earth’s orbit. Traveling at speeds of 15 kilometers per second, even a small piece can cause significant damage. Space pollution threatens to destroy satellites and other crucial space infrastructure vital for life on Earth, including telecommunications, navigation, disaster management, environmental protection, agriculture, financial services, and more.

The project, introduced by a coalition of private and public aerospace organizations, created the first astronomical constellations made from space debris to draw public attention to space pollution ahead of a pivotal UN meeting.

We talked to Art director Rohil Borole & Copywriter Shruthi Subramanian from Serviceplan Innovation, to learn a bit more about the project:

Most likely, few people deal with space debris in their everyday lives. Had you ever engaged with the topic before the project? What facts surprised you?

Space debris (a result of space exploration) threatens critical space infrastructure that we need for telecommunication, navigation, food production, monitoring of climate change and so much more. The realization of the direct impact in our daily lives is what led to the project.

What is the general design concept behind the project?

The problem of space debris is invisible. We wanted to create a virtual space observatory, a viewfinder that makes the problem visible. The primary visual device is of course the constellations. These simple icons make all the data behind this complex topic understandable. Due to the scarcity of debris imagery, we utilized point clouds to depict the extensive debris clouds around Earth, mimicking environmental litter. The design also features neumorphic user interfaces reminiscent of space-tech consoles, organized through a margin-based layout system influenced by space monitoring equipment. An accent of orange color highlights the potential danger, while the presentation of graphs, maps, and numbers adopts a textbook-like, factual visual language, allowing users to form their own informed opinions.

The project is based on scientific data. Visualizing this data and making it accessible to the public in an understandable way is no easy task. Have you received feedback on whether this has been successful?

The familiarity of constellations has helped us reach a wide audience, regardless of their technical background or age. We’ve been able to help the public engage with an extremely complex subject. Especially by focusing on student groups and spaces such as planetariums. We hope this initiative leads to the rise of more space environmentalists around the world.

Did anything change for you personally as a result of the project?

We’ve come to understand that all exploration comes with a cost. Space is just like the rest of the environment on Earth, and is shared by all of humankind. It’s not meant for any one nation or party to exploit. It’s high time the international community reached a consensus on this issue.

Thanks a lot for the insights. More projects like this!

Creative Direction: Serviceplan Innovation
Design Studio: Eat, Sleep + Design
Digital Design Studio: Moby Digg
Development Studio: Owls Department

Sound: Jürgen Branz, Christoph Groß
Type Design: Michael Clasen
Production: peoplegrapher
Motion Designer: Hendrik Sommerfeld
CGI Studio: Non Zero

WAS IST GUT 2023

The German Designer Club (DDC) awarded ideas and projects in its design competition WAS IST GUT 2023 (transl. What is good) on September 22, 2023, aimed at making the world a better place. 12 winners were selected through a democratic and discursive process by the awardees themselves. A publication documents the works awarded in the DDC competition from 2021 onwards. This serves as a representative and discursive reference work for the design scene in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The German Design Club stands for good design and is the leading club for designers of all disciplines in the German-speaking world. For over 30 years, the DDC has embraced design holistically to create sustainable value for society. How do we design things that add value? How do we create value-based living environments? How do we shape content with value?

In the second edition of the DDC Design Competition, the focus was on asking the right questions. WAS IST GUT—DDC Design Competition: Discursive, Participatory, Democratic by the German Design Club recognizes projects that are good and important because they create values and promote a social, democratic, and environmentally sustainable future. The publication not only showcases the awarded world-improving ideas and winners but also discusses the question What is good? in relation to design. After all, the Competition is also innovative in its process.

At WAS IST GUT, the participants themselves act as the jury – discursive, participatory, and democratic. With contributions from Robin Auer, Simon Daubermann, Claudia S. Friedrich, Felix Kosok, as well as from Georg-Christof Bertsch, Friedrich von Borries, Kirsten Dietz, Jonas Larbalette, and Ruben Pater.

Publisher: form publisher
Designer: Pascal Botlik of BÖE studio in Zurich, with consulting by Barbara Glasner from the form publisher.
Volume: 460 pages
Format: 16 × 12 × 3,7 cm, 560 g
Language: German

Workmanship: Softcover with flaps, open thread stitching, and Cradle to Cradle printing.
ISBN: 978-3-943962-75-8
Price: € 29,90.–

Get more information here!

Que des numéros 10

Don’t produce new jerseys. Print empty!
Urgent creation of football jerseys without consequences.
Choose the remaining sports equipment in a second-hand store. Multiple cuts and colors.
Zico, Zidane, Bergkamp… be a number 10! Cut out and stick the numbers 10 on the back of the jerseys. Print an entire silkscreen frame in vibrant green. No need to attach content, just stamp empty. Remove the stencil. The number 10 fades away, revealing the original fabric. The rectangle creates unity.

Annulation-By-Addition

Typography as the writing of absence, or the attempted erasure of a form by its double.
Want to annul the information on your T-shirts? Apply a layer of silkscreen in a color as close as possible to that of the fabric. Urgent, tools need to be reactive. Use stencils!
The support becomes the place where two fragments of identity coexist and challenge each other.
Watch out for the resurgence of the pre-existing sign. Its disappearance is always visible, perhaps even more visible than it once was.

Animal Farm

Just as Tetsuya Ishida portrayed Japan’s lost decade, contemporary Chinese youth have opted for passive resistance, adopting a laid-back approach in the face of existential anxiety. They are reluctant to immerse themselves in work, eschew romantic pursuits, encounter challenges in acquiring homes, and harbor little hope for starting families. Modern anxiety permeates every aspect of life, intensifying as the challenges of existence become increasingly daunting.

HST 2023

The knitted piece was created on the knitting machine and was the visual identity of the University of the Arts Bremen 2023. The typography on the knitted poster is interwoven like the wool it is made of and also just like the disciplines taught at the HfK. In addition to the poster, a trailer was created in which the model wears the knitted piece. In this way, the graphics become wearable and combine classic graphic design with fashion.

Typeface of the Month: Rialta

Welcome our new Typeface of the Month: Rialta! It is the latest addition to the Playtype catalog. A do-it-all and intentionally neutral grotesque that perfectly adapts to whatever you throw at it.

Crisp, clean, and contemporary—Rialta draws inspiration from and pays tribute to the multitude of neo-grotesque styles that came before it. Loosely rooted in Swiss design heritage, but without enforcing a strict dogmatic approach in its use of references. With its large x-height and low contrast, it is highly legible and works perfectly as a text typeface, communicating clearly even at small point sizes. It is available in nine different weights, ranging from Thin to Black, with corresponding Italics.

Rialta supports a wide range of OpenType features, including stylistic sets. This provides access to alternate glyph shapes, which adds even more versatility and functionality to this utilitarian typeface.

Typeface of the Month: Rialta

Foundry: Playtype
Designer: Jeppe Pendrup
Release: April 2024
File formats: OTF, WOFF, WOFF2
Weights: Thin, Thin Italic, Extralight, Extralight Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Regular Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Demibold, Demibold Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Extrabold, Extrabold Italic, Black, Black Italic
Price per style: € 50 / Full font family; € 450 (50% off)

BUY

Wage Against The Machine

Wage against the machine is a hybrid project between typographic & artistic research practice enhanced by Ismahane Poussin.
When she began her project, her desire was to hijack the tools of fashion, and more specifically knitting, to turn them into a space for typographic and protest questioning, exploring the border between patterns and letters with messages against fast fashion. She works with hacked machine (brother kh910 + arduino connected to an open source software, Ayab).

Mauhan.com

Mauhan.com is a personal website and social experiment, created in collaboration with—and for—Máuhan Zonoozy (known as M), to defy the ordinary and make people think.

The concept for the website started with an observation: today we are all terminally connected. So, what if we took this concept to the extreme, and created a website where M is always available, 24/7, for a 1-on-1 call, with a truly permissionless connection? How would people feel about being catapulted in an intimate setting with him? Just to discover that maybe he wasn’t really there? This became our social experiment.

As people land on the website, they think they are landing on a Google Meet, and see M walking in the room and staring at the screen as if he’s distracted by something else on his desktop (it looks like he forgot to exit a meeting and left the camera on).

For the experiment to work, we had to make the experience feel believable, so we carefully designed every element of the landing page (including a custom set of animated emojis) to look realistic, while also conveying M’s unique and refined look and feel.

As users interact with an interface they are familiar with, their actions surprisingly take them to additional unexpected pages on the website. Only then it may occur to them that it’s all meticulously staged, and that M is not, in fact, there.

Once M shared the website on social media, the response was immediate, and in no time the engagement soared, reaching over a million impressions on Instagram within the first few hours of sharing. As a result, Mauhan also heightened his personal profile.

Love it—or hate it—the site doesn’t leave room for indifference. Don’t believe us? Go ahead, try it for yourself!

Rites – Collection One

Rites is where garments and threads hold hidden narratives, blending sustainability with artistic expression. Deadstock fabrics become limited-edition collections, weaving sustainability into style. Our canvas transcends fabric, becoming a tapestry for the mind. Hand-illustrated graphics and cryptic messages blend with traditional typesetting, crafting a visual language inspired by Renaissance codes, long Los Angeles nights, and the spirit of individuality.

Soft Type Collection

Soft Type is a collection of typefaces designed for knitting color-work. Each typeface has a “Regular” and “Charted” version and some include multiple scales so you can fit type on your knits, no matter the project’s size.

These typefaces were designed with machine knitting in mind, but could be used for hand knitting, needlework, bedazzling, or many other textile crafts.

All fonts are available through Google Fonts.

Future Valkyries Collection Look 1: Hildr (Battle)

People are entrusting the future to the virtual world, but the real world is very much ravaged by war and injustice, while women’s rights are in regression.

It’s time to shift our attention back to the world around us, pick up our spears in this never ending battle for equality and liberation.

The dress consists of excerpts From “Wið færstice”, and “For a Swarm of Bees”. Two charms that described valkyries.

Garment Design by Xixi Tong
Variable Typeface “Spears” by Knife Knife

People

Custom font Grotteccini for Gaia Segattini Knotwear, an artisanal knitwear brand founded and directed by Gaia Segattini. The brand is made in Italy, is sustainable, innovative, and produced in synergy with a manufacturing company of excellence from Le Marche region. Unisex clothes and accessories made from Italian fine-quality leftover yarns, with creative and contemporary design.
PEOPLE – Knitted scarf, 50% wool, 50% PL / 200cm x 25 cm

care label fragments

it’s a digital artwork focused on the interior labels of our clothing usually printed on a white nylon tag in a simple black font as is also the case for most fashion brand names. they’re the passport to our clothes giving information on where they are made and how to preserve them. designed to be understood by all of us, the universality of laundry symbols helps give them a timeless quality. clothes definitely have a long history before arriving in our hands and become part of our identity

Kodama Typeface

KODAMA is a grotesque, experimental Far-East writing system based, latin typeface with more than thousands ligature combinations with sharp strokes and strong contrast. Designed for Pinetime’s AW22-23 collectionand is influenced
by the Japanese alphabet and writing systems. Retaining its characteristics and traits where a kanji sign means a word, it’s transformed into a Latin system and made a contemporary, all caps, sans-serif typeface.

Kreat(e)ur

Clothing always has a shape.It can emphasize the silhouette, it can also hide it, it can be official or casual, it can be comfortable or restrict movement.How the shape of clothing can change in motion, in the absence of a person, in a crumpled state, flying, taken off by a person?What is the relationship between body and clothing?What happens to a piece of clothing when it loses its body?What does a disembodied dress tell us?Do we fill clothes with our bodies or do clothes envelop our bodies?

ich du er sie es

Transitions
We use clothes carelessly every day.
Just as we use language as a matter of course and carelessly.
What if language is not just a tool, but becomes a major work?

We question things and can free ourselves from commercial patterns and fast fashion.

It’s about a piece of clothing that is always wearable, always fits. Like the sweater in all seasons.
Why not take a playful approach to language and clothing.

MAKE MASCULINITY OBSOLETE Words Clothes Expression Communication Design Project

An increasing number of people – mostly men – have felt threatened by critical voices questioning the conventional concept of the term. ‘Make masculinity great again’ is often used as their slogan – an unmistakable homage to the former US president Donald Trump, a man who arguably embodies the conventions more than anyone else. This work is a comment on this phenomenon. The message is not just to question the concept of masculinity but rather to argue that we should get rid of it completely.

Bleach

Paul Troppmair created a unique lettering design for the Viennese Music-Duo Laikka’s album »Bleach.« The experiment involved transferring these letters onto fabric using a solution of bleach and water. By employing different sprays, the outcome showcased vibrant results with intricate details. The process allowed for every piece of merchandise to be unique.