How Can Graphic Design Be More Human, More Organic, More Artful?
We have always been graphic-design artists, through personal cards and letters designed throughout the years with hand-drawn illustrations and custom typography to professional projects that include the creative direction of illustrated art books, magazines, marketing collateral, and web products. Although design comes to us naturally, we’ve challenged it, too; we’ve explored other forms of art, such as painting, drawing, and multimedia works, primarily to excavate some of what we felt was missing in so much of traditional graphic design. (To see our sister studio painting studio, click here.)
The underpinnings for our new design studio practice, Atelier Ravel, began in the summer of 2018, during a trip to the desert outside of Palm Springs. We began to contemplate the ways in which we could integrate into graphic design some of the properties more readily associated with other fine arts: a more fluid aesthetic; a more philosophical approach; a more direct connection with nature; and an attempt to change the way people see, not just in the service of marketing or selling a particular product.
This is a page from one of our first logo studies. We developed a very graphic logo/identity, shown at the bottom of the page, but we were not satisfied. It felt too much like regular graphic design, and we wanted to indicate, at first glance, that we were something different, something a bit more unexpected. When we returned to the drawing board, we focused on the idea of a more painterly or artistic mark.
This is a page from one of our later logo studies, after we decided to create a more painterly branding. We wanted a logo that immediately triggered new concepts of graphic design—a design more human, more organic, and more artful.
As our new studio developed, our work coincided with the global pandemic, making our initial considerations all the more essential. We felt more committed than ever to create a graphic design that could be more human in its conveyance, more in sync with our planet, and more artful in its embrace of beauty and compassion. We believe that highlighting these qualities, which could be argued as superfluous in some design circles, only makes our design better.
Our work aligns closely with the personal and professional missions of writers, artists, literary agencies, publishers, galleries, museums, journals, not-for-profit institutions, and any enterprises committed to the humanities or humanitarian causes. We have built trusted partnerships with such clients already (see some examples from our portfolio). It is also an exciting challenge to bring our sensibilities to other companies that might not immediately fall under the categories above, but may still wish to create a new form of identity and storytelling committed to human dignity, planetary wellness, and deeper understanding. We believe such design is more than possible—it has the ability to transform our lives.