Create Awards: The winners of the 2013 Create Awards are announced. Neue Folk: Traditional skills in a digital age. THE CULTURE OF DESIGN www.desktopmag.com.au
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Contents
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REGULARS 10 Bulletin November 13 Life/style Bree Claffey 14 Longform The Craft Cult of Etsy 64 Review Recent Releases
CREATE AWARDS Winners & Highly Commended Entrants 34 Judges & Sponsors 36 Project of the Year 38 Catalogue 42 Emerging Talent 46 Identity
64 Fresh Brooke Thorn
50 Illustration
IN THIS ISSUE
54 interactive
14 Cut and Paste I Like Birds 19 Feature Maricar/Maricor 24 Trails Hazel Stark 29 Perspectives Buy Your Modernism Here
56 Motion 60 Packaging 64 Photography
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68 Print Commercial 72 Print Creative 76 Signage & Display 80 Typography 58 Website
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LO N GFO RM
The craft cult of Etsy Words — Leanne Prain Illustration — Julian May In the days prior to the burst of the dotcom bubble (or the second rise of the internet as we know it) there existed many empty spaces in the internet. It was an innocent playground awaiting the arrival of the really big kids. Around this same time, being ‘crafty’ as a designer meant using a household iron to apply gold embossing foil to an inkjet mock-up. Craft and design were not said in the same sentence, but of course this was all before we could even conceive of Etsy – an ecommerce site, otherwise known as the world’s biggest craft fair. ‘The cult of Etsy’, a satirical referral to its devoted users, has become an online giant. The mega-site launched in 2005 with $50,000 in seed money, bearing a resemblance to a mash-up of Antiques Roadshow, Dwell magazine and eBay. Etsy has placed handmade goods and those who create them at the centre of its business model. By August 2013, the site had 30 million users who generated over a billion dollars in sales. It is the ultimate example of author Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail Theory’ about Amazon – where a niche product line will find a dedicated following among a select few, where multiple small sales result in a greater yield. Etsy’s appeal is simple – it provides a global audience for small, artisan-led businesses, and this has changed the scene for craftspeople. It used to be solitary, a primarily localised activity – potters, carvers and weavers worked in their studios and sold one-to-one at craft fairs. The lucky ones might be carried in a gallery or gift shop. Etsy circumvents this by providing individual craftspeople and designers with the ability to host their own virtual storefront for a nominal fee. No longer restricted to the local community hall craft fair, makers of handmade goods can upload images of their items, create a look-and-feel for their shop using a customisable banner, and engage in a wide variety of promotional transactions. Etsy purposely ensures that the goods that sellers promote stay niche, with a focus on the retail of handmade goods, vintage items (20 years or older), and the sale of art and craft supplies. Contraband goods can, and often are, reported in order to keep the Etsy vision intact. ‘Sellers’ (that’s the company’s official terminology) rely on grassroots marketing and positive feedback ratings from private interactions with buyers. On Etsy, one can buy all of the goods that would normally be found at a rural craft fair: log pattern quilts, tooled leather belts, crocheted toilet paper covers and egg-starched doily angels. But amid the traditional, contemporary-looking work, the site is ripe with limited edition silkscreened posters and prints, vintage letterpress type and the work of fledgling product designers. Where the crafters are, the design-conscious have followed. Just as the efforts of Target, Martha Stewart, Dyson and
Apple have educated the general public about the value and principles of great design over the last decade, this design awareness has spilled over into the craft community and Etsy has been an instigator of this transition. As a site, Etsy doesn’t just host storefronts – it educates. As its mission, the company encourages sellers to get better at what they do – by providing them with tips to make their work distinctive from others, the presentation of goods more marketable, their photography more desirable. In addition to hosting ecommerce, Etsy houses an introspective magazine-style section full of craft tutorials, site tips and the ever popular ‘Quit your day job’ series – focusing on sellers who have given their nine to five gig the heave-ho in pursuit of making handmade soap or jewellery. What makes a seller successful on Etsy is the same skillset that most graphic designers have in their repertoire – the ability to create a unique product, the skill to describe this product succinctly, and the knowledge to have the object art directed and photographed well. With the relatively low listing costs of US 20 cents to list an ‘item’ and a 3.5 percent cut of sales, Etsy provides a platform for designers to test their appeal in the online marketplace without investing in stocked product, storefronts or long-term commitment. A seller can choose to sell one item or 1000 items. Etsy provides the opportunity to not only reach new audiences through the internet, but to sell niche product lines directly to them. “Etsy was an experiment that has since turned into a smart business investment. You have access to millions of shoppers,” says Mélanie Kimmet, a graphic designer, who opened her eponymous Etsy shop and greeting card line in 2011. “I saw Etsy as an unbiased community that appreciates small business. It was a good way to test my work on a wide and curious audience.” For Kimmet, a designer who was looking for a creative outlet from her rigorous day job, Etsy provided the opportunity to get feedback from those purchasing what she made – something she would not likely have experienced if she had taken her business through the traditional channels of selling her work through wholesale arrangements or licensing agreements. “I loved being part of this community,” Kimmet says, “for its real-time honest feedback.” It is not just freelancers launching small product lines – some design firms have even used Etsy to sell goods from their studios. New York designer Agnieszka Gasparska, of the celebrated New York design firm Kiss Me I’m Polish, started an Etsy shop to sell a line of hand-crafted felt ornaments to adorn children’s t-shirts. Amanda Schultz of Canada’s Woodward Design sold overrun prints of the studio’s seasonal client gift – a typographically-themed cookbook.
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TH R EAD I N G AH EAD Sydney sisters Maricar and Maricor work with one eye on the future and the other on the past, their embroidery weaving together time-honoured hand skills with contemporary ideas. In their work, one can observe traditional crafts bonding with contemporary visual communication, with a certain warm and comforting success.
M/M comprises two sisters, with different creative backgrounds, working together. How has this worked out creatively? Maricar: We have been very fortunate that our different skill sets complement each other well and have enabled us to collaborate in a variety of mediums. These days we concentrate more on our embroidery work, but we still find that we have different strengths that allow us to cover a variety of the graphic and lettering styles that clients desire. Maricor: After graduating, we went on to work in studios focusing in different fields, but we’ve always shared the same aesthetic sensibilities. So although in the beginning Maricar worked primarily in print and I was in motion and animation, we continued to collaborate on illustration and personal artworks on the side. Our embroidery skills are equal, so depending on our schedules we’ll each take on responsibility for finishing an embroidery from start to finish. We both have particular lettering styles that come more naturally to us, so it’s quite handy to be able to present clients with a variety of treatments. How has this worked out personally? Maricar: We have more similarities than differences, so for the most part we work well together. It means though that the times where we do disagree, it comes as a surprise and debates can be fierce. Maricor: Our temperaments are very similar and we share a harmonious
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environment – there are no fights over what plays on the stereo! There aren’t huge differences in our approach to a project, but when they happen we can get quite heated! But I think it’s healthy to have these discussions and arguments. It might sometimes be a negative thing that we think so much alike – these arguments are refreshing and ensure that we’re challenging each other and ourselves to think differently. Has there always been something of a collaborative spirit between the two of you? Maricar: We’ve always been a team and there was an unspoken expectation that we would one day work together professionally. Having studied our entire lives at the same schools could have made us competitive, but thankfully it was the opposite. We’ve always been motivated by each other’s achievements. Maricor: Yes, there’s always been a collaborative spirit between us and it’s always been a positive thing. Less competitiveness and more motivation to improve on what the other twin is doing. The typographic embroidery you have produced over the years is unique to M/M, how did it develop? Maricar: Whilst working in our last studio, Mathematics, we did an embroidered project for the band Architecture in Helsinki. We fell in love with embroidery, but it was such an intense project that we didn’t touch it again for another few years.
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Maricor: My first piece was ‘You gotta keep cheering’, which is a studio motto of ours. It was a personal work we submitted in our application for the British Council Australia’s Realise Your Dream award, in which I combined several lettering styles. The response we had from the panel was so positive we decided to keep on sewing and exhibit some of these pieces. Is the needle and thread more of a tool to you? Are you not ‘embroiderers’? Maricar: We like to think of it as a mark making tool and find we can be more experimental that way. Also, because we’re self-taught, we don’t feel entitled to call ourselves embroiderers. There’s a lot to the craft and we’re still novices.
We’ve always been interested in handgenerated graphics and we knew that was what we wanted to focus on in our new venture, but it was a happy accident that we picked up needle and thread again. It was in the early days of M/M, and I had some lyrics stuck in my head. They were like my personal mantra/motto, and I decided to embroider it for my boyfriend as a gift. I needed a quick way to figure out the colour palette before embroidering – previously I would have done this digitally using Photoshop, but instead I used some watercolour pencils, which were lying around. The colour bleeding and transitions inspired the gradient sewing technique and painterly approach to sewing that we’ve worked with ever since. Maricor: Music inspires us and it was lyrics and mixed up expressions that formed the basis of our first personal embroidered artworks. The painterly style we explore with embroidery developed from the watercolour sketches we design lettering with. It translates well with needle and thread and allows us to explore colour in a more fluid way. What was your first piece like? Maricar: That first typographic piece was based on a Unicorns’ lyric ‘Hungry colours surrounding me’. But I realised only much later that I had mistaken a word, and what I heard as ‘colour’ was actually ‘cougar’! Happily my version made much more sense to me and fitted well with our new interest in embroidery.
Maricor: It’s only after we’ve gone through sketch rounds, or watercolour or digital colour mock-ups that we pick up a needle and thread. We always struggle to describe what exactly it is we do. It’s probably more accurate to describe ourselves as designers who illustrate and illustrators who embroider. There is a common sensibility and aesthetic that carries through all your work, whether it is a piece of graphic design, animation or embroidery. Where does the geometric repetition and textile pattern originate? Maricar: I find pattern and repetition very calming and search for it instinctively. I guess that’s influenced the forms that interest us, as well as the mediums we like to work in. Stitching is, at its core, a series of repetitive strokes, and what interests us is exploring the different texture you can create with that basic mark. Maricor: We grew up in a 70s era home, which had clashing patterns on every surface. Maybe that’s where our pattern obsession comes from! I would see faces in the floral wallpaper and play a game of Tetris in the tiled flooring in the bathroom. The use of needlework is quite a traditional craft skill, yet you put it to quite untraditional use – what tone of voice or visual language do you think that embroidery lends to the phrases or images you produce? Maricar: There’s a nostalgic quality to our work, which people often respond to because either they or a family member used to knit or embroider. We often play with visual puns and cheeky wordplays, so
desktop 11/13 — desktopmag.com.au
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HANNAH WALDRON Stark: Hannah Waldron has moved seamlessly from illustration to textiles in recent years, but I love that she’s still uncompromising in her style and visual language, whether it’s screenprint to paper, or printed textile or weave. She uses puzzling narratives and landscapes, quite Escherian, with a dollop of 80s Hockney and a bit of Bauhaus. It’s all very ambitious and I love it. HANNAHWALDRON.CO.UK
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WILL EDMONDS Stark: I was a fan of Will Edmonds’ work long before bumping into him at a local pottery class. His sense of humour just cracks me up and that warmth is in everything he makes, whether it’s his drawings, sculptures, websites, videos, music or ceramics. He jumps disciplines quite dramatically, but it is all a pleasure to see, feel, watch or hear. Usually, simple shapes drawn with scratchy loose mark making is hard to pull off, but he does it with aplomb! WILLIAMEDMONDS.CO.UK
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PROJECT OF THE YEAR
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Andrew Robertson
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Chance Operations
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