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03.11.15

Studio Visit

French Illustration Duo Atelier Bingo

Someday, when someone writes the definitive book looking back on how the internet changed life in the 21st century, they'll include stories like Atelier Bingo's: After living in Paris for two years post-graduation, Adéle Favreau and Maxime Prou decided on a whim one day to leave their burgeoning graphic design careers behind for a life in the countryside, and guess what? It didn't make a lick of difference. The pair now run a bustling illustration studio from a converted factory in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre owned by Favreau's uncle, and thanks to the magic of email, it hasn't stopped them from selling prints online and working with clients like Vogue, The Plant, and Wrap Magazine, plus companies they did graphic design for back in Paris, now three hours away.
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01.13.15

Sighted

New Textiles by Alyson Fox for Ferm Living

When we profiled the designer and artist Alyson Fox last year, on a visit to the home she and her husband built themselves in the wilds of Texas, we spent much of the story marveling at the sheer, unrelenting range and volume of her creative output. Which is to say: We could theoretically be writing about some new project of hers every week if we wanted to — she's just that prolific. We won't go there, of course, yet when of-the-moment Danish housewares brand Ferm Living offered to let us be the first to share the new line it's done in collaboration with Fox, in advance of revealing its full 2015 collection to the world tomorrow, we figured it was as good a time as any to check in with the talent.
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01.12.15

Sighted

Alma Charry, Illustrator

The ____-a-day trope — wherein a designer sets quotidian goals for him or herself in order to achieve maximum work efficiency and output — has reached epic proportions lately, and you know what? We're okay with that. The latest example we've come across is an advent calendar by Parisian illustrator Alma Charry, called 24RAPIDO, where the designer produced one drawing a day, each day leading up to Christmas (as well as some cute bonus GIFs). We like Charry's work in general, which is a mix of Society 6–ready patterns, freeform ink-washed drawings, and figurative prints.
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12.22.14

Up and Coming

Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo of Amateurs

For all its perks — freedom, travel, never having to take off your pajamas — the freelance life has one perpetual drawback: the panic that starts to creep in whenever you're between jobs. Add that to the sense of creative fulfillment that every designer and artist craves, and it's no wonder so many of them start their own projects on the side. For the Paris-based couple Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo, whenever they don't have work as a freelance illustrator (Julien) and a film and animation director (Angdoo), they dream up new projects to release under the extra-wide umbrella of their shared endeavor, Amateurs; launched in June, the website comprises projects that are experimental, hand-crafted, and fall somewhere between art and design, like painted tea towels and flags, embroidered sweaters and blankets, plus actual paintings as well. We checked in with the duo to find out more about the collaboration.
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12.08.14

Sight Unseen Presents

SU x PAOM for The Standard Shop

Last week in Miami, you could go home with art in just about any form — not just on a canvas (Art Basel) but in the form of a vase or a table (Design Miami), a pool toy (Grey Area x FriendsWithYou), a champagne bottle (Ruinart x Georgia Russel), or, if you happened by the shop at The Standard Spa, beach gear courtesy of yours truly. For this year's Miami fair, Sight Unseen teamed up with Print All Over Me to curate a line of warm-weather clothing and accessories sold exclusively at the Standard, featuring prints by Paul Wackers, Ellen Van Dusen of Dusen Dusen, Peter Judson, Rachel Domm, Caitlin Foster, Marta Veludo, Eunice Luk, Branden Collins, and Rafael de Cardenas (who designed the shop's interior a few years back).
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Marcello Velho
11.21.14

Graphic Design

The UK Illustrator Making Abstract, Tumblr-Inspired Art

We've become quite fond of these late-Friday hits of pure joy, and this one arrived in our inboxes just in the nick of time. Marcello Velho is a United Kingdom–based graphic artist. His abstract compositions have quite justly made the blog rounds in recent months, but we particularly love the new styled photos he sent of his work below, which mix Tumblr-inspired art with modern furniture icons.
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11.11.14

Invitation

Sight Unseen Turns Five!

Perhaps the greatest joy of our 5-year tenure has been the amazing and fruitful relationships we've formed with our peers — all of the people who create, love, photograph, and write about design every day right along with us. These people clearly feel the same about us, seeing as when we invited them to help us celebrate by making us a fifth birthday card, we were overwhelmed by not only the quantity of responses but also by the thoughtfulness that went into each piece.
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09.03.14

Sighted

Inka Järvinen, Graphic Designer and Printmaker

Finnish graphic artist and designer Inka Järvinen began her career with a degree in fashion from Helsinki University of Art and Design in 2005. But after graduating, she quickly discovered she preferred designing in two dimensions to three. So what do you do when you hold a diploma in something that doesn't suit your true passion? You follow those dreams back to school and get yourself a second degree! Armed with a BA in graphic design, Järvinen went on to co-found Tsto, a design agency whose hotshot clients include Artek, Levi's, and Nokia, and she continues to work on solo projects in her spare time. We especially love her graphic prints, controlled yet unpredictable. They're clean, and perfectly executed by someone that clearly understands the principles of balance, line, and pattern. We've excerpted some of our favorites after the jump.
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08.25.14

Sighted

Sigrid Calon, Visual Artist

For some reason, this is the week we finally put our money where our mouth is: First we took home one of Fort Standard's beautiful, mint-colored standing bowls, and then, on a whim last Wednesday, we picked up a risograph by Dutch visual artist Sigrid Calon, who we've had on our radar for quite some time. The hardest thing about buying Calon's work is narrowing down your options to just one — each print, which is based on the Tilburg artist's interpretation of an embroidery grid, is beautifully layered, using eight gradated colors, dots, and lines to achieve endless variations. Which one would you choose? See more after the jump.
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Peter Judson Memphis Design
08.04.14

Graphic Design

Peter Judson’s ’80s-Inspired Illustrations Are A Playful Homage to Memphis Design

With all the talk of Memphis Design suddenly in the air — Gizmodo and L'Arcobaleno both recently name-checked Sight Unseen in stories about its not-so-recent resurgence — we thought that sharing these '80s-influenced illustrations would be a fun way to start the week. They're by recent Kingston University graduate Peter Judson, whose work is a playful homage to Sottsass and the gang but has been compared to everything from Nickelodeon cartoons to “a cheap rip off of the latter works by Roy Lichtenstein.”
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07.18.14

Up and Coming

Chad Kouri, artist

Chad Kouri took his first freelance design gig at the tender age of just 15, but like most creatives, Kouri had trouble at first striking a balance between paying the bills and pursuing his passions. “I moved to Chicago after high school to study design, but knew I didn’t have enough money to finish a four-year program. So I took as many classes as I could and then jumped out to work for a marketing firm, which was not at all fulfilling. I was basically designing junk mail for five years. After hours, I’d work on editorial illustrations or custom typography, but I quickly realized I didn’t enjoy being on a computer 16 hours a day. I started doing collage as a way to break away from screen time. I used to reference a lot of old ads and typography from the ’50s and ’60s, and I wanted to work larger but the pieces could only be as big as a magazine page. That’s how I transitioned to using flat shape and color, and that’s pretty much where I’m at in this experiment of an art career that I have.”
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07.07.14

Graphic Design

Kristina Krogh, Artist and Graphic Designer

Kristina Krogh studied graphic design before setting up her own studio in Copenhagen in 2012, where she spends part of her time on freelance design projects and the rest on her extensive line of limited-edition art prints, notebooks, and notecards, pictured in this post. Her layered geometric compositions feature a mix of contrasting and complementary surface textures taken from everyday materials like marble, ply, wood, cork, and paper. "My inspiration comes from the things that surround me: a beautiful old parquet, a perfect color combination on a building, a stone floor in a church, a bike ride through Copenhagen," she says.
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