Today I’m experimenting with fonts and characters to create smiley faces for a new bag design. While working, I discovered I’m certainly not the only one who thinks it is fascinating how little clues we need to see a face in a random object. Three strategically placed dots are enough:
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These playing cards belong to the first production sample I recently got sent by my publisher. The game is called Mozaa, and today I’ll tell you where it started. It was one of those ideas I had years ago. I was doing a designboom online course on paper, and one of the assignments was to design a simple children’s game.
I wanted to do something with patterns, irregularity and bright colours. Patterns intrigue me, especially if they are not completely geometric. In this case the stones of a breakwater like this one inspired me. The stones fit together, yet each one is a bit different from the next. It is fascinating to look at, I think. This is what the first drawings look like:
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I never leave the house without a small sketchbook and a pencil. I’m specific about that: it needs to be a Moleskine, and the pencil needs to be a refillable lead pencil. Without these two companions I feel mentally obstructed. I need them to jot down ideas, to note interesting thoughts when they surprise me while doing the dishes or to just doodle away during a long boring train journey. They’re my thinking tools: sometimes an idea gets stuck in my head, and leaves no space for anything else. While drawing, an idea starts to develop. It’s fun. The pencil gliding over the paper, the page slowly filling and ideas pouring out.
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Let me tell you the story of a little wooden stool. Its conception started a year ago, when I was working in Ho Chi Minh City as a member of Future Living Studio. There, in Vietnam, one needs little more than coffee and a few plastic stools to start a business. Everybody, from factory workers to the stylish city girls can be found drinking ca phe, eating lunch or dinner in a ‘plastic chair place’. I was fascinated.
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Blackberry picking is one of my first memories: carried high on my mom’s back I tried to put as many blackberries in my mouth as she put in her bucket. Back home she would make the most delicious jam. After she was done, and all the clean glass jars were filled with deep red, warm sweet blackberryness, I would clean the last bits out of the pan with my fingers.
Now, grown up and all, I still have a hard time passing a blackberry bush without stopping: I just have to eat them. So you can imagine the thrill I felt when I discovered some bushes with dark, ripe blackberries near my house. The harvest: almost two kg!
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