Prototyping futures.
TAPPER GEIST
ART DIRECTION & PRODUCTION
2013
Tapper Geist was a small design studio of which I was one of the founders.
This project is a collaboration between me and Julia Persson at Tapper Geist. Copy, illustrations and photography: Julia Persson and contributors at Medea.
Medea Lab, Malmö University, is a transdisciplinary media lab where researchers and artists address cultural and societal challenges through experiments, installations and interventions.
In 2013, Medea commissioned a publication summarizing their research themes and collaborations. This resulted in a magazine distributed both physically and digitally.
The design is inspired by fanzine magazines and might look chaotic at first glance, but it is highly legible and structured. The visual hierarchy of typography, imagery and color themes guides the reader, whether they browse or read each article from beginning to end.
The main challenge was to create a consistent design with imagery that greatly differed in style and quality. To tackle this, the imagery was treated to mimic the look of photos copied on a low quality black and white photocopier. This created a consistent feel throughout the production and made it possible to work with color and overlays to underline the sense of experimentation. Whenever possible, high quality full color photographs were used.
The publication was nominated for the Swedish Publishing Prize in the category Informational print the same year. The printed magazine was very popular, highly requested, and printed in a second edition.