There’s countless reasons why certain books could be important to read as a graphic designer. There isn’t one single text that can be pointed to, as different texts can be important for different reasons, and show their significance at different times. So instead of answering this question on my own, I decided to extend it to all the other Samantha Prouds, and compile a small reading list. 

            What quite a few of these contributions reveal is the importance of broadening your reading to outside our discipline. As Andrew [Walsh-Lister] & Matthew [Stuart] already identify quite well [in their Big Time Choices contribution “Writing / Reading Around the Subject”]—graphic design never exists on its own.

            Spending time reading outside the field, through whatever the genre may be (fiction, memoire, theory, history, etc.), opens up new ways of thinking and approaches in the work we do, building a more personal and critical perspective on it.

— Sean Yendrys

Sara Ahmed, Disorientation and Queer Objects (2007)

Danielle Aubert, The Detroit Printing Co-op (2019)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (1977)

Jessie Bullivant and Jemina Lindholm, Access Riders (2022)

Muriel Cooper, Computers and Design (1989)

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (2018)

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, A Reexamination of Some Aspects of the Design Arts from the Perspective of a Woman Designer (1989)

Anthony Froshaug, Typography and Texts (2000)

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)

Anthony Huberman, Make it Thick (2015)

Sara Kaaman, Once Upon a Time (2023)

Jean-François Lyotard, Paradox on the Graphic Artist (1997)

Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own (1934)

Alice Motard (editor), Beau Geste Press (2017)

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

Norman Potter, What is a Designer (1980)

Seth Price, Dispersion (2002)

Lisa Robertson, Time in the Codex (2023)

Legacy Russell, Black Meme: A History of Images that Make Us (2025)

Rosalie Schweiker, Work to Rule (2017)

Akshi Singh, In Defense of Leisure (2024)

Paul Soulellis, What is Queer Typography (2021)

Kae Tempest, On Connection (2020) 

Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978)

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011)

Edmund White, The Personal is Political: Queer Fiction and Criticism (1994)

Kate Wagner, On Neuschwanstein Castle, Part 1 (2024)

Jen Wang, Now You See It (2023)

Bloodknife, Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny (2021)

AWL

Last week, during end of semester critiques at Yale School of Art (where I’m currently teaching full-time), I said something along the lines of: I often find the most articulate writing on graphic design to be discourse around literary translation with ‘graphic design’ switched in. By which I mean writings on the process and poetics of translation that I find myself mentally trading ‘translator’ for ‘graphic designer’ or ‘typographer’ while reading. Writings that trouble the position of the translator and its self-reflexive nature, its ‘encircling’ (Rosmarie Waldrop on Ernst Jandl), its ‘body-snatching’ (Donna Stonecipher on Friederike Mayröcker), its use of ‘fidelity’ as bromide (Sophie Collins on ‘Joy & Happiness, Fidelity & Intimacy in Translation’). Writings that aren’t about graphic design, but offer a useful analogue and vocabulary. This is, of course, nothing groundbreaking to highlight; graphic design as a discipline regularly and necessarily latches, attaches, borrows, interlopes, parasites from its disciplinary neighbours. (See: Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey remarking that graphic design isn’t an ‘A PRIORI discipline’ and ‘only exists when other subjects exist first’ in Dot Dot Dot 8 published in late summer 2004 and Daniel Frota de Abreu’s In Praise of Opacity published by Werkplaats Typografie and ArtEZ in 2014.)

When Matthew and I briefly compared notes, we immediatley agreed that we both find ourselves leaning towards writings that could be said to be related to graphic design that are inhabited, embodied, modelled, rather than told, described, spoon-fed. An iMessage from Matthew reads, ‘approach over style / technique’.

At the end of 2020, we published the fourth installment of Bricks from the Kiln, BFTK#4: On Translation, Transmission & Transposition. Conceived with guest co-editors Natalie Ferris and Bryony Quinn as event / publication, it existed initially as a series of live talks, performances, readings, screenings and texts in circulation (that took place at LCC and Burley Fisher Books in London; Inga Books in Chicago and in Pig Rock Bothy at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh) before being transcribed and supplemented as a printed edition. I mention this specific issue because it allowed us to invite a number of writers and artists thinking critically and expansively through linguistic and material forms of translation (such as Kate Briggs, Don Mee Choi, Sophie Collins, Jen Calleja, Caroline Bergvall, Phil Baber and Maria Fusco), and many of these pieces continue to be key points of clarity and reference when I think about embodied approaches to writing about / around a discipline. This semester I’ve been co-teaching a first-year undergraduate seminar with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff cross-listed between the School of Art and the English Department, for which we used part of our class budget to give everyone in the class a copy of BFTK#4. And Sophie Seita’s piece in the issue, ‘Let it Percolate’ — a kind of anti-manifesto manifesto ode to non-verticality and slippage in modes of reading — frequently appears in my class reading lists and suggested sources.

Here, Sophie Seita advocates for ‘translation as a form of writing-as-reading; and translational reading as a pedagogical tool’. A form that ‘teaches you to read’, that ‘tries to understand a text by doing something with it’. In the first iteration of a typography class I started teaching in Fall 2024, this approach was foregrounded as an attempt at working (and reading) with and through. That typography is working with language as it becomes visible, and is grounded in positionally, reading and orality. I gave the class a series of lengthy subtitles, borrowed from various sources. Two of these are: ‘words are very much like lizards; they change colour according to position’ (from Lafcadio Hearn’s 1920 Talks to Writers) and ‘font-voices summon a reader into visible earshot’ (from Susan Howe’s essay ‘Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’). 

MS

I often find myself in conversations with students reaching for texts on literary theory before my mind goes to a reference directly related to the discipline for which I’m addressing, that of graphic design. Perhaps literary theory is too expansive for what I actually mean, for what I often reach for are essays by writers — long-form, critical, reflective — on the process of writing itself. Immersing oneself in the material substances of our practice is, for me at least, an integral part of understanding how to shape and express. An old typography tutor of mine would frequently say, ‘a competent typographer is foremost a good reader’. Which I took to mean: first, comprehending a text is crucial in knowing what to do with it, how to treat and use it; second, digesting and absorbing a text is key to intellectual growth. In 2021 I extended these thoughts in an experimental elective class I taught (and still teach) called Lazy Machine on typography as publishing, where I focussed for a full semester on ways and acts of reading. The myriad: reading in a chair, reading aloud, reading alone, reading to others, reading conjuring voices, reading as politic, reading as social, reading as seeing, reading as being, reading as practice/practise, reading as writing, reading as positioning. At the start of the term I gave out an essay I comprised from my own reading on and around the subject, an opening reading on readings that weaved together 90 separate passages, a gesture I hoped would activate the act itself. It came with the long-winded title ‘One may, if necessary, read the newspaper while eating (or, rather) read to sense the doubling of time’, magpied from Walter Benjamin and Lisa Robertson respectively. A line by Lydia Davies that I quote has stayed with me. She echoes this idea of reading as action, as fuel, as an involved process that is alive and ongoing: ‘To read is to translate, and to translate is to write, to write to read, to read to write.’  

And with that in mind, like Andrew, in attempting to describe the specific role of a graphic designer / typographer my reach always extends to contemporary writings on translation. Typically, writings that address and complicate the position and draw in the presence of the translator and writer, or rather, writer / translator, and by extension, explore the push-pull tensions between author, mediator, reader, and modes of making / creating and reading / receiving. Where clarity, fidelity and accuracy are replaced by greyness, self-reflection, questions, empathy and attribution. Two lowly disciplines often seen as means to an end, misunderstood as faceless operators or invisible facilitators are here established anew, defiant yet modest and self-aware. An approach and mindset rooted in form and style but well-rounded, porous and “rational”. In most, if not all, authors situate their knowledge and position, generously opening up to reveal that they — and we — are not mechanical mediators of language (textual and / or visual) but messy, idiosyncratic, biased and spirited people, who are inevitably subjected to particular labour conditions and shaped by our context and time. Kate Briggs’s book This Little Art remains a firm favourite in this regard. Her book-length essay weaves together recollections of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes from French to English, alongside compelling stories of other translators, interlaced with tender moments of mothering, care and reading to her children — in fact, I am writing these thoughts in Notes on my phone for fear of waking up my two and a half year old child whose room adjoins our studio where my laptop is left. Parenting / translating / designing are improvised, rational, complex, dialogical, asynchronous, asymmetrical and relational activities that bridge a betweenness. A generative crossing of one to another, exposing us to understandings and misunderstandings, dispelling ‘monographic, single-handed authorship’ and this ‘fantasy of unmediated address’ (Briggs).

In my mind, there’s also a cognitive editorial switch that flicks, replacing ‘translator’ for ‘graphic designer / typographer’, or ‘writing’ for ‘designing’. To illustrate our point I’ll borrow from Sophie Collins: ‘Translation [design] is a mode of writing and a performance of interpretation. Translating [designing] is reading. Translation [design] is listening and speaking, assent and argument.’ Or, now to take from Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘all writing [designing] is translation’, and, most profoundly, ‘translation [design] is entirely mysterious.’

During a short stint running a typography class at a provincial English art school in 2014, I began a project titled Film-to-Book with a very simple proposition: translate a piece of moving image into a book, transposing frames for pages. I’ve returned to versions of this project many times since then — so too has Andrew — expanding, tweaking and skewing each further iteration. I have always found it to be one of the most productive — and arguably complicated — assignments I’ve engaged in with undergraduate students. An exercise in ‘typotranslation’ (a term Richard Hamilton used to describe his version of Marcel Duchamp’s notes on the Large Glass, ‘rendering’ French to English and handwriting to metal type), revealing the ‘oddities’ of language, exposing its gaps and crevasses and identifying, to quote Anne Carson, ‘the point where one language cannot be rendered into another’. A few years after initiating this project, by fated coincidence, Andrew and I were asked to design an anthology with Sophie Collins on interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation, titled Currently & Emotion: Translations, published by longtime friends and collaborators Test Centre (now Prototype). The opening essay articulated much which until that point i could only intuit and inevitably became one of the sparks for BFTK#4, an issue I return to again and again. There’s a line in the beginning of this introduction where Sophie, with the words of others, states that translation is a political act.

Circling around the subject has always been a productive way for me to provide an outline of a thing in its absence. In part this has to do with the broad nature of the discipline and its fractured, yet specific independencies on certain mediums and techniques, but crucially an outline leaves room for possibility and imagination.

The first time my name was ever written was on a cake, a few weeks before I was born. My father, a history enthusiast, wanted to name his heirs after the name of some despots of ancient Europe. My mother was firmly opposed to it, and with the support of my grandmother, decided to name me after my Swiss grandfather. Taking advantage of my father’s absence during a post-lunch walk, the two matriarchs delicately etched my name into the icing of a carrot cake. When he returned, he had no choice but to accept their resolution. It turns out you can’t overturn a decision written on a pastry.

The first complications came just days into my existence. To avoid confusion with my grandfather, it became necessary to add the prefix “petit” (“little”) every time my name was mentioned within the family. My surname, also widely used as a first name in Francophone countries, has led half of my professional contacts to call me—unknowingly with a military tone—by it. Inversion of first and family names, misspellings, fanciful pronunciations, and the use of my full name linked by a hyphen—as if it were a compound name—are just as common as the correct usage of my forename. This is not to mention the wide range of nicknames referencing East Asian cuisine or TV characters that have spontaneously been given to me by both acquaintances and strangers.

If the primary function of a name is to identify an individual and, in a way, act as an extension of their identity, then it seems that mine does a rather poor job of fulfilling its duty. But I am not here to blame my parents: I have also come to realize how difficult it can be to name someone—or something. I am currently in the midst of the painstaking process of choosing a name for a studio I’m planning to start with a friend I met during my MA studies.

Adopting a pseudonym to define a practice in the field of art and design is fairly common today. It was even more so in the past—for instance, during the Edo period in Japan. Painters would then frequently change their names according to their age, level of accomplishment, changes in affiliation, spirituality, social status, location, sources of inspiration, preferred formats and mediums, or any other significant life event.

Hokusai is a textbook example: he was apparently as prolific as he was indecisive, having changed his gō (the signature used by artists, poets, and painters) up to 50 times over the course of his career. In fact, he only adopted the name by which he is commonly known today in his forties, when he began illustrating novels and became an independent painter—somewhat by force, after being excommunicated from the painting school to which he belonged. For each new direction he explored, he gave himself a new name: Katsukawa Shunrō when he was drawing portraits of actors, Sōri when collaborating on illustrated collections with poetry societies, or later Taitō (roughly meaning “crowned by the sacred constellation of the Big Dipper”), when he published his successful manga series.

He reached the “peak” of his career in his sixties, a period during which he painted the famous Great Wave off Kanagawa. At the time, he went by Ichū, a name that evokes both “to be one with the world” and “to be a one-year-old (baby) again.” Toward the end of his life, while lamenting that he still didn’t know how to properly paint a cat, he humbly signed his work Gakyō Rōjin, or “the old man obsessed with painting.” He was actually so consumed by his practice that, never having the time to clean, he moved over 90 times, abandoning each house he lived in (which he mostly used as an atelier) once it became too messy.

As tempting as it may sound to change our studio name every five minutes, I don’t believe it would be particularly strategic for a newly forming graphic design studio to give in to that impulse right away. But it’s fair to say that the old painter was being pragmatic in choosing names aligned with his methodology, work environment and the range of clients he engaged with.

Thinking of what feels important to us, we have come up with a few criteria for the kind of name we would like: something that speaks of our interests, sounds good, feels serious without being pretentious, acceptable in our field, specific without being limiting, easy to remember and hear in noisy environments, pronounceable in English, French as well as Albanian, and hopefully able to stand the test of time.

To help guide our search—and to conclude this text—we have compiled a list of some of the keywords and naming  commonly used by design practitioners we have come across:

Atelier, Studio, Office, Maison, Bureau/büro, Société/Society, Maison, Cabinet, Lab, Room, Workshop, House/Haus, Study; Archive, Formats, and/et/und/&; Group/Grupo, Team, Agency, Union, & Cie./& Co., Partner(s), AG/ltd./Inc., Société/Society, Associates, Work(s), Service(s), Practice, Design, Graphic design, Type, Project(s)/Projekte,

 

Full name, Name & Name, Name-Name, NameName, Name + Name, Name(s) & Co., Aliases, Acronyms,Wordplays, Portmanteau

City, Continent, Country, Country code, ZIP code, International Code

Prefixes, Hyphenation, Punctuation, Symbols, Numbers

Carlo Canún is a graphic designer based in Mexico City. His work delves into forms of language and storytelling, examining methods of knowledge production through various mediums of publication and forms of dissemination. Utilizing words, ephemera, objects, and clothing, his exploration extends beyond visual culture and production into distribution models, archival systems, and categorizations, specifically within queer narratives, where the generation of knowledge arises from a demand to reinvent the conventional.

Fernanda Saval and Carlo Canún engage in a conversation as they reflect on ways of sharing, reinterpreting, and reimagining queer archives through graphic design as expressions of both collective and personal memory.

1. Question every brief and if you have time rewrite it in a way that suits the way that you work. Share this with your collaborators so as to achieve some form of togetherness. This may help with any creative differences later down the line. 
2. Pressuring yourself to achieve something unrealistic is a waste of your energy. Do what you can, within your means.
3. Don’t be conned into thinking that only instagram can help you. Every material available is strictly contemporary. 
4. If a project is getting messy, try to find clarity and do one thing at a time. If you choose to embrace chaos do so with intention.
5. Try to keep the best parts of your academic experience alive in studio projects. Think about what processes make you happy and see if you can recreate this professionally.
6. If you are miserably dissatisfied with your work on a job, remember it’s only graphic design and you can always try again next time.
7. Let’s all just forget about originality. Surround yourself with what you are interested in and borrow what you need to.
8. Make options (if you want to). Your ideas can be part of a continuation of your way of working, reusing ideas is healthy and they can always be developed into something new.
9. Broke? Make something out of found materials. Maybe there are some envelopes in the academy's store cupboard…
10. Not loving your own work is normal but remember others may see something where you don’t. Share it and remember it does not represent you or your ideals. 
11. Communication breakdown is often the cause of ‘bad’ work. See if there are quick and easy ways to manage expectations. If your client is being rude, reflect on why they may be behaving in such a fashion. It’s probably nothing personal.
12. Colours are subjective. Don’t get annoyed when your client asks for them to be changed. Consider what parts of a job are most important to you and distribute your energy elsewhere. Remember it is not a battle and it shouldn’t feel like one. If they want it in yellow choose your favourite shade of yellow.
13. Support your contemporaries.
14. Can’t focus? Why not Collect, dig, borrow, fold, pack, glean, collage, annotate, rip-it-up, build, combine, gift, send, burn, support, present, talk, clean, frame, organise, curate, collate, or read out loud
15. If you like something, write a letter to its maker telling them why. Deeper engagement with your interests can be very enlightening.
16. Don’t ignore the canon, study it and its decay. There is no such thing as a clean break from the past.

Rietlanden Women’s Office is a graphic design duo based in Amsterdam, consisting of Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde. They run a publication series named MsHeresies, that investigates collaborative design methods from a feminist perspective and looks at ornamentation as a form of critique on labor practices. In a recent conversation they talked about their ways of collaborating and dealing with inadequate working conditions.

How did you start working together?

We met during our studies at Rietveld, both of us had a strong interest in feminist graphic design methods and collective work. After graduation, we started sharing a studio with two other friends. Initially, it was mainly about  sharing space, but we were exchanging ideas often, critically discussing graphic design and working conditions. Our feminist discourse was always quite intersectional, we think about gender issues in combination with class and race. 

           When we started building our own practices as freelancing graphic designers, we experienced this big discrepancy between what we believed in and what we were doing. You suddenly become a one-person company, competing with other one-person companies. We went from being friends to becoming small businesses in competition. The way we challenge this is by choosing to work together.

Today we have this studio together and work on commissioned and self-initiated work. We work four days a week, always together.

Do you only work four days on principal? 

We spend four days a week together in the studio. Wednesdays are what we call "Typography Wednesdays"—a day fully dedicated to type design. But it’s also a flexible day, so you might be doing laundry, resting, or just following whatever feels right. Most often, it's things like visiting a museum, catching up on chores, or taking it easy. Sometimes we’ll also use the time to work on solo projects.

           Even during the four days we spend in the studio, it doesn’t mean we’re strictly working the whole time. We’re always present during work hours, and most of the time we are working—but "work" is the central theme of our practice, not just in doing it, but in questioning it. We explore work as a concept, even as a form of critique.

           It’s telling that the first piece of furniture we bought for the studio was a sofa. It was important to us that there was always a place to lie down.

In your practice you tackle the topics of rest, work and labor. How do you balance resting within your practice? 

In a perfect, utopian world, balancing rest and work would not be a question, since everything would be intertwined. 

We have this concept of the ornamental life that we borrow from the designer and writer William Morris. Your life is ornamental when you have enough so-called animal rest, which is rest in abundance. It's not the resting you do in order to recover or be able to work, it's an abundant all-encompassing rest. 

Animal rest is one part that needs to be covered for an ornamental life, the other main conditions are having variety and agency in your work. With these three aspects fulfilled, production or making would be a spontaneous action. 

Given the circumstances we’re living in, that kind of animal rest doesn’t come naturally.

We often talk about the brokenness of ornament under these current conditions. There’s no space for animal rest, no real agency in our work. That’s why we’re thinking about what we can do instead—because the kind of ornamental work that might happen under ideal conditions just isn’t possible with the system we’re living in.

What are the tools you use to create ornamental work in these unideal conditions?

We think of ornaments as traces of the conditions under which work happens. What kind of environment do you create? What tools do you use, and who do you work with?

           We're especially interested in ornamentation that emerges through collaboration, because it naturally shapes and limits the methods you can use. For example, it can be really freeing to simply decide: “I’m going to work with two friends on an etching press, and we’ll do it Thursday from 10 to 5.” You have no idea what the outcome will be, but chances are it’s going to be something ornamental.

           It also instantly makes you question the tools you’re using. If we think of ornament as a trace of working conditions, then we’re naturally pushed to consider how we’re using those tools—how they shape the production and the process. To us, that’s the most interesting part.

           For instance if we decide to work together using software or hardware that’s really meant for just one person, the visual result is going to be influenced—maybe even distorted—by that setup.

How do you compensate for those shortcomings?

When we’re working together on a single computer in InDesign, we try to balance out the software’s limitations by staying in constant conversation. Over time, we’ve started giving names to the processes we use frequently and to the elements we include in our designs. It helps us ask: how do these elements interact, and how can we talk about them?

We work with all sorts of visual fragments—images, pieces of images—and we often give them names that are a bit humorous, maybe no one else would find them funny, but they are at least to us. 

We've set up this rather unconventional working environment and the language that comes out of it becomes also quite strange. Our work is a lot about how text and ornaments meet—who has to make way, where do they overlap and so on. We would for example say “Can you play the piano in order to make the snake move out of the way?“ These analogies help us describe what’s happening in the process, together with the names we give to each ornament.

The main reason we do this is because it's fun to work in this way, but also because we see each layout as a sort of painting that we are trying to figure out together.

S-H:                            The second thing we ever made together was a shabby diagram on a brown napkin. We made it in Tallinn’s sweetest cafeteria—French bossa nova playing in the background, mirrors and grandmothers all over. It was still warm enough for short-sleeve t-shirts. You looked up from your book, to show me a paragraph that reminded you of me …

E:                                It was from Silvio Lorusso’s What Design Can’t Do. 

S-H:                            The napkin was stained with butter and tea, and my pen carved right through it. One axis marked the audience, the other legibility, the arrow going up and up and up. Talking through these thoughts with you made it all much clearer to me. 

E:                                It seems somehow apropos that it began with a diagram, back of the envelope workhorse for translating an idea when words aren’t painting a clear enough picture. A diagram spatializes a thought for the purpose of sending it into the brain of someone who may put things together differently, for holding disparate things together, for mapping one mind onto another. Also in this category are flow charts, gantt charts, messy schematics, shared drives and spreadsheets, arena boards and rambling instagram saves. When something isn’t a complete, closed thought, before it has been smoothed and shaped, we offer it to our collaborators to translate, improve upon, extrapolate from.  

S-H:                            The first thing we ever made together was a drawing of a horse with a smile where it shouldn’t be. 

S-H:                            While thinking about collaboration I believe it to be important to keep in mind that its process is often a combination of generous and messy—painful and exciting. At times it seems so easy to romanticise it, and then, at other times it’s much easier to resent it all. That being said, there is so much to love though …

Megan Berkobien:      Collaboration… is like carefully gathering downed power lines to harness and redirect energy.¹

E:                                Collaboration bundles forces and responsibilities. With our powers combined, what can’t we do? If we can crack the code on how to iterate together, how to trust and push one another, a special alchemy can be achieved. Sometimes working together means four hands on one keyboard. Sometimes it means sending away a file or a piece of writing with complete trust that the next thing that will happen to it will be magical. Lifelong collaborators John Cage and Merce Cunningham barely interacted with one another, making a dance and a piece of music separately, to be performed at the same time and place. 

S-H:                            Also: making together can, at times, feel quite magical: 
*** Many hands make light work

*** More collective skills make richer work

*** Your collaborator(s) might take turns where you didn’t expect them to …

*** … Making for more unpredictable and exciting results and processes

*** Authorship has the possibility to shapeshift, and to different forms

Linnea Lindgren:        The concept of the author exists in relation to work, an audience and to various social structures. In the definition of the word, an author is a creator, maker and originator—an individual who creates a piece of original work. The legal understanding of an author through copyright law links the notion of originality with intellectual property, ultimately connecting it to market value and the liberal culture of individualism. For the audience, authorship provides a means of categorising, organising, and defining the value of works they encounter. The concept of authorship creates and reinforces relations of power within the society. It is important to recognise that access to author status is not universal, and it intersects with existing inequalities.² 

S-H:                            Collectivity provides a platform for sharing burdens, amplifying voices, and building something larger than any one person could alone. Think of girl bands, and group chats, 2015 YouTube collabs (Troye Sivan AND Tyler Oakley), labour unions, Adobe-subscription-couples, collective boycotts and protests, or even marrying for tax purposes.

S-H:                             There really is so much to love about it … Which makes it so easy to romanticise it all. So much so, that when reality comes bearing down on you, it can feel quite crushing. And at those times, and in my personal experience, right after I felt most utopian and most naive, I also felt the most disappointed in how collaborations went. As of recently I’ve taken much away from you telling me, during a winter afternoon walk, that being with people (all people) in a meaningful way (in any kind of relationship, romantic or professional), will always result in some friction. Not just these specific people that cross your path are messy and complicated, but all people are. I have since forgotten your actual words, which were visual and tangible—but since then, I’ve really enjoyed keeping that thought close.

E:                                We were on our way to grab coffee somewhere across town in Tallinn: 

E:                                I’m trying not to get my greasy fingerprints on your book and you’re putting on your headphones. I’ve been delinquent on this project for a week or two and have been leaning heavily on your uncanny knack for starting and managing. We’ve been juggling, but I have dropped a few lately, and I’m feeling insecure about it. Both of us like to overpromise, we hesitate to delegate, struggle to say when we are at capacity. We are both past capacity right now, but plates are spinning, deadlines are whizzing toward us, we are (stuffing more and more metaphors in here) tap dancing like our lives depend on it. I think it’s ok that one person carries more than the other in a collaboration, as long as that role is shifted back and forth between the two (or three, or six). Ideally, it’s not always strictly legible in the end result who has done what, who pushed here or pulled there, that the thing itself transcends authorship a little bit, becoming more than the sum of its parts. I wipe my fingers on the napkin and pick up the book again: 

Linnea Lindgren:        Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed approaches the writer as a context: “I would argue that the ‘who’ does make a difference, not in the form of an ontology of the individual, but as a marker of a specific location from which the subject writes.” Instead of emphasising the individual, the focus could shift to the social and the political context. Who else was involved? What were the production methods, How was the labour divided?

     A potential new way of defining the relationship between a work and its maker can be found by gathering the messy parts surrounding what might otherwise be considered individual authors. As Ahmed asks: “Is it possible to theorise the relationship between writing and embodiment with assuming an ontological authorial identity?”³

S-H:                             Might be exciting to consider the ways in which frequent collaborators’ identities start to combine and merge. Sometimes this can happen quite explicitly,through studio names, maybe a new IG page—sometimes even an entirely new persona with its own network and tax ID.

S-H:                             I think (per usual) of my dear friend Noam Youngrak Son, who started a project with Sara Fitterer, under the name Anguille Vannamei⁴—pronouns it-slash-they. Together they publish (visual and digital) essays regarding their search for diagrammatic languages for more-than-human economies. I love (!) the name Anguille.

S-H:                             Similarly, we reached out to Zamme Projects, a collective in Mexico City made up of designers Sonia Malpeso and Karen Mata Luna. Though they both work independently of one another, as Zamme they are more of a platform, or the central node of a creative community that bridges Mexico and Europe, hosting talks, holding workshops and making projects. Asked to diagram the different ingredients in this combination, they sent us the following:

E:                                Maybe this is a good place to mention the word ‘collaborate’ is (obvious when you say it slowly, I suppose) to co-labour, to labour with. 

S-H:                             Etymologically the word conjoins the Latin laborare (to work), with its Germanic preposition com- (meaning: with, or together). In Dutch, my mother tongue, it’s even clearer! Samenwerking is pretty much together-work-ing. Both words show, in their composition, that just as important as collectivity, labour and work sit front and centre. 

E:                                The concept of collaboration, like graphic design itself, like a lot of creative work, seems to occupy a strange place in the imagination that belies the amount of labour actually being performed. Making beautiful things, if we are lucky enough to do that, takes a lot of work, and collaborating might make the work half, but sometimes makes it double. 

S-H:                             When we first sat together to talk about joining forces for our essays (French for attempts) for Big Time Choices, we thought many hands would make for—as the expression goes— light work. Now in retrospect, we of course realise some of that sentiment was at least a bit optimistic. Instead of being responsible for two contributions, we each somehow became responsible for four.

E:                                The romantic, mystical, sometimes utopic feeling of being well matched by a collaborator can morph slowly (or sometimes quickly!), into a more ambivalent sense of imbalance, mismatch, disappointment or resentment. The freedom of shifting roles, of give and take, can also give collaborators nothing solid to hang on to when they need to negotiate the amount of work taken on, or the degree of authorship they can claim. 

Jo Freeman:               Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness—and that is not the nature of a human group.⁵

S-H:                             Wanting to broaden our horizons we reached out to Maki Suzuki from Åbäke (a transdisciplinary graphic design collective based in London). I remember him from a workshop with Bebe Books, a queer collective based in Ghent I joined shortly after, and was a part of for about two years. It all started off by him asking everyone to contribute one thing we’d like to see happen in the course of a week. We assumed we’d choose and pick a few throughout the day. After some stretching he told all participants had to collaborate, as one entity, to fulfill all these wishes. We ended up making a really big and furry dog in an exhibition space, designed quadrilingual flyers, and hosted walks, talks, and bark sessions, and so on, and so on. 

E:                                Curious about the way Maki pictures the structure of his collaborations, we reached out to him to ask for a sketch. We received the following exuberant and mysterious response:

Maki Suzuki:             FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF OUR COLLECTIVE, THEN COLLECTIVES SINCE 2000. (Sorry for the all caps, I didn't mean to shout.) The four central dots are the four people in åbäke. Everything else corresponds to how and other people or communities we have worked with. It includes fake or unfortunate collaborations.

E:                                Without a key to which dot is what person, and which collaborations were unfortunate or GOD FORBID (i’m shouting on purpose, Maki) FAKE (as in they didn’t happen? Or perhaps they happened but couldn’t really be described as collaborative), we can only start to draw these circles and dots around our own alliances, cataloging their successes and failures, considering dreams dashed and unexpected outcomes of both kinds. 

E:                                All good collaborations do come to an end, even the ones that have broken our hearts have had something to teach us. Sometimes (don’t want to draw the comparison to romantic relationships too tight here, one more metaphor and I’m Carrie Bradshaw) push and pull of collaboration grows us up in a pleasant way, sometimes the lessons feel a little more hard-knock. I personally have a folder of client projects that I secretly call ‘I will never make this mistake again,’ which I would somehow categorize as some of my most fruitful collaborations. 

S-H:                             Again in Dutch (I don’t know what I’m on today), we have this expression that says de handen in elkaar slaan. I’ll freely translate this as: smashing hands together! More than collaborating, it also means supporting each other in the many ways we know to. We drew this diagram some weeks ago. I find it a fitting note on which to conclude.

Could you tell the reader what you are up to these days in Berlin?

Alejandro

The weather is quite nice already, if you know Berlin you know you can’t take it for granted and have to be ready for it to change all of a sudden, but all the signs now seem to be aligned, the trees are green and the flowers are blooming. It is a good time to enjoy being outside, going to a park, to a lake, doing a bike trip or just hanging out on the street with some friends.

Louise

I’m currently living and working in Berlin, as an independent graphic designer and teaching assistant at the Berlin university of the arts.

Paula

Work-wise, lately I’ve been spending half of my days in a week making, crafting, researching, thinking, emailing together with a close friend – someone I look up to and learn a lot from = Louise. I also work individually and have a part-time position at an artist-run residency. Non-work wise, thinking of other things to make together with friends, questioning how to progress and the need for it, going to things, walking a lot, trying to cook at home more, wishing to become a dog walker, enjoying sunsets at the big field.

Berlin is a very popular destination for EKAGDMA graduates. How did you pave your way in this big city?

Paula

Still paving! I did two internships first and started working at the residency, which came through by sending an unsolicited application. I didn’t see it at the time, but that part-time position helped create a routine, some place to return to when not having a studio or a flow of projects to work on. 

My initial steps in Berlin were filled with a lot of frustration and confusion. I found that the bureaucracy was difficult to navigate, more difficult than other places I’ve lived in. It was incredibly helpful to have a group of people around, mostly met through the MA, who were knowledgable as freelancers / tax-payers, or others that were going through the same process. 

Louise

My way here was also a way back home as I lived and studied here since 2013. 

Alejandro

I first came here during my master’s. We spent about four months in the city. It was during COVID, so things were quieter than usual, but even then, I liked it. You're not the only one coming from abroad, so there's a shared experience among a large part of the people living here. With such diverse backgrounds and paths converging, the city feels like it's constantly bending, making it feel more welcoming.

During and after the master’s I was lucky to work on some projects that were based here, that made me think that more things could happen if I was here.

When I came here the second time, after the master’s, it was for an internship with Julia Novitch. I was quite new professionally, I had no idea about so many basic things and she helped me a lot with it. After that I moved to a studio space with some friends and continued working as a freelancer.

The EKAGDMA program has gone through quite a lot of change since it started. As one of its first attendees, can you tell me what it was like in the beginning?

Alejandro

Beginnings can be both hard and exciting. When something is new, it might not be clearly defined, and even though someone might have a vision, the form it takes is going to depend on all the people involved, each person moving in different directions, stretching and shaping it as they go.

I had a bit of that feeling, that we were part of something that was taking shape as we were walking, talking, designing, reading or watching a movie.

Paula

The beginning of the program was exciting! Freedom! But limits! Confusing! Everyone trying their best! Messy! But cool! Pandemic! Bleuh! Stress! Schedule? Kind of! Experiments! Lock-down Berlin! Sad moments! Happy moments! Personal! Challenging! Starting our own platforms – the library, Drama, radio. It felt like we were all a big clumsy puppy. Bumping into things, hungry, playing, chewing, doing puppy cries sometimes.

Louise

The first year was a vibrant mix of confusion, excitement, and deep commitment. Sean made everyone feel genuinely welcome and encouraged us to shape a significant part of the program around our needs and ideas. One aspect I especially loved was how hosting became a central part of our collective practice. Sharing dinners with fellow students, department staff, and invited guest teachers created valuable opportunities for informal learning, exchange, and connection. These moments felt essential.

(What sometimes got lost in all of this, however, was time for self-care.)

Why did you choose a brand new MA program to attend? Was it scary?

Louise

For me, it felt more exciting than scary. After six months of lockdown at the start of COVID—and with freelance work in Berlin dropping drastically from 100 to almost 0—it felt like the right moment to begin a new chapter. I was excited to study again and ready to take on an adventure.

Paula

We had Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey as one of the first guests and he asked this question as well. I felt so nervous to answer, because I didn’t understand what this kind of program means. I mean – it’s just a new MA program? I answered something like – yeah, well, it’s experimental, exciting. But I didn’t know what that even meant and I didn’t really know this pocket of graphic design before, or much about the graphic design field in general, to be honest. (Thank you for taking me in!)  

I was very excited to be part of a likeminded-ish group of people and to make together – maybe that’s a bit cheesy, but it’s a 100% truth. And something about how this program was communicated felt very exciting to me. I felt like this would be a very different, collective and rich experience in education – and this turned out to be true.

Alejandro

I had already decided I wanted to do a master’s while I was still in the middle of my bachelor’s degree. I had a few options in mind when I came across EKAGDMA. I barely knew any of the staff, and I had heard only a few things from Tallinn before.

There was nothing from past years that I could look at as a reference for what to expect. Still, going through the curriculum gave me a good feeling. The idea of taking part in something just beginning felt exciting and a unique opportunity.

Do you feel more confident in your ability to navigate your work/freelance/other projects after completing the MA program?

Paula

For sure! But maybe I’m an easy target because I had no experience at all before. The program laid the groundwork for me. Throughout the years, we had moments of generous input about pricing your projects or making agreements with clients. Sean was very transparent about it and also organised this ‘business school’ evening with Dinamo which I found very helpful as a starting point for grasping the admin work/pricing. 

I really disliked the amount of different threads of projects we had to work on simultaneously during the MA, but now I see it primed me for the split in attention you have to learn to be ok with. Ah and of course there were projects that came into the MA that we could work on, whether internally at EKA or elsewhere. I was lucky to also meet Greta who joined the MA in the next year and we collaborated on different projects after graduation. The MA gave me friends to work with. 

Louise

Yes. Doing the master's helped me find a stronger position in how I want to work. Even though clients can still be challenging at times, I never forget why I love designing and the process that comes with it.

Alejandro

Being in the master’s expanded my view of what graphic design can be. Being surrounded by a diverse group of people with different practices and interests has changed the way I observe things around me, it helped me better understand that acts, gestures, objects and ideas are neither neutral or isolated, they exist within broader contexts that shape their meaning.

What advice would you give to a graphic designer considering moving to Berlin?

Alejandro

There are several things to consider that can sometimes be hard to find: housing, work and a community. For housing, the most useful thing is to spread the word among friends, and friends of friends. For work, looking for an internship could be a good start for some people. And for building a community, that varies from person to person but it is something important to pay attention to. It can take some time until you find your space.

Paula

If you’re deciding to register in Berlin and become a freelancer there, sign up for KSK (the artist’s social insurance fund). Get a bike! Kleinanzeigen is good for that. I wish I had decided on learning German early on already, now it’s a bit more difficult to talk myself into it.

Stay open with your expectations, ride the initial wave of enthusiasm, invest time in building a community, have no doubts or fear about reaching out to people, trust your luck as well. Remember to keep in mind the reason you decided to move to the city. If you can, don’t get too consumed by work-work-work – there’s a lot to stay curious about and take part in here. Take care of your body, bike to the lakes for a swim in the summer. Also let us know when you arrive! 

Louise

Don’t give up too early. Berlin is a harsh place, especially if you arrive between October and March. Building up a stable network takes time—but it will keep giving.

A group of 4 humans are sitting in their shared studio, working away or trying to. They are all friends so it feels good to sit there together – isolated behind big screens but it helps to have this barrier for focus. Every 15 min or so, one of them might lose focus and do a silly move or a joke, the rest will pitch in and get lost into it for a few minutes until they remember they have to work again. 

They all do graphic design. One is focused on web development, three of them are or have done teaching part time and another one works for an artist residency on the side, just once per week. All four have worked with each other in one way or another. 

They all rent this studio. One of them is renting it only for a month because she's not sure she can keep paying for it so she plays it safe. Another one of them says it's worth to take the risk because that's how you might end up getting more income. Say, one of the friends gets a project they need help with and since you're sitting in the same room, they might just ask you, because they know you, your skills, abilities. That actually does tend to happen. 

It's Monday afternoon, 7th of April. Three of the friends receive an email, all at the same time. They don't recognise the name of the sender but after a quick scan through the text a familiar set of letters pops up. The letter combination gives them a warm feeling – something they used to write on rocks with other rocks, marking the letters in white. They watched their friend spray paint it on an abandoned building. Someone else would trace it out on a dusty car, or expose the letters on a screen and print them on many different kinds of pieces of clothing. They were marking their territory, claiming their belonging. EKA GD MA. It's burned onto the deeper layers of their brains, forever. 

But now they are FLAP – the 4 friends, sitting in a room together. The room they share allows them to exchange projects and uncertain directions, to borrow each other’s skillsets, to seek advice on how to price the services they offer or how to draft a better response to their clients.

After they receive the email from the unfamiliar yet somehow familiar sender, asking to address the transition from a student to a design professional, FLAP speak about perseverance and money and different memes depicting the effects of learning a skill. Some mention the experience of teaching and what it brings to them, and what they tell their students (to hold the paradox). 

But actually, the core message here could be about the importance of cultivating one's own territory of operating and to acknowledge the role of proximity for making it work in this field. The importance of physically being in a shared place and being surrounded by people one aligns with and that chose this particular professional territory, which isn't the easiest to exist in. Those people you match with aren't the easiest to find either. 

Holding the paradox (a poem)

I want to draw my own wild things—
flap-flap wings and purple trees.
But friends ask for dogs and stars.
And I want to make them smile.

I feel pulled both ways.
Alone and not alone.
Free and together.

So we flap our ideas like birds.
And draw side by side.
Not always the same—
but still flying.

I know I’ll burn out. It’s going to happen, it seems logical. I’ll get overwhelmed, I won’t slow down, I won’t know how to say no, and then I’ll be afraid of what comes next, I’ll admire the productivity of others, I’ll schedule meetings during my lunch breaks, I’ll refuse to go out to finish a barely paid project, I’ll say I’m “tired but fine.”
            Long silence.
            Maybe it will even happen several times. Not because I want it to, but because it’s stronger than me.

The term burnout means (1) the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion (2) the failure of an electrical device or component through overheating. The image is striking. In psychology, this term was first used in 1975 by the American psychologist and psychotherapist Freudenberger to describe a “state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life¹.” As the use of the word state implies, burnout is not a depression, nor a mental illness, it’s an event-based phase. A moment of shock that lasts three weeks, a year, or more. You’re stunned. Your body takes a hit. Your brain shuts down. The muscle snaps. You hit the wall.

In a context where attention to these symptoms is increasing, definitions of burnout have proliferated, sketching the blurry contours of a term that has become overused. Though not insignificant, European legislations hesitate to name it. A sign of partial and uneven recognition, they prefer to talk about “syndrome of professional exhaustion²” in France, “psychische Erschöpfung” in Germany, or “severe professional stress” in Belgium.

Yet, there is a diagnostic tool that claims to clarify things: developed about twenty years ago, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the first “scientifically developed measure of burnout.” While this model aligns with the World Health Organization’s definition³ of this state of shock, it also asks me to rate on a scale from 0 to 6 about twenty statements. It takes 10 minutes, at most. Almost more than the horoscope which tells me “work: you’ll give your all, and if your efforts don’t pay off right away, don’t get discouraged and be patient.”
            Behind its apparent neutrality, the quantitative logic of this questionnaire already seems to impose a rigid, normative view. Combined with its focus on personal symptoms—such as emotional exhaustion, dehumanization, and accomplishment at work—the MBI is already skewed toward an individualistic interpretation of burnout, neutralizing its social, structural, and political causes.

A 2014 study⁴ by the prevention firm Technologia approaches things differently. It announces that “3.2 million French people are exposed to a high risk of burnout.” The phrase being exposed means being subjected to the action of, or more literally, being within sight of, suggesting that external factors are involved. 
            The study goes on to show that the work environment itself plays a central role in the exhaustion process, its very status quo making it incapable of reversing the phenomenon. In this neoliberal context that defines success with sacrifice, performance, and productivity, you must constantly strive for machine-like perfection. You must live up to the ideal of flawless work. You must be flexible, adaptable, and not make mistakes. In short, you must internalize these injunctions and tie them to your self-esteem to be valued while becoming more likely to crack.
            The report also highlights the high vulnerability of self-employed professions to burnout. Farmers are on the front lines, followed by craftsmen, shopkeepers, and business owners. It makes sense. And it’s explained by the difficulty of setting one’s own limits, but also, and more importantly, by the climate of permanent uncertainty these professions face.

The status of the independent graphic designer is no exception: an artist-author is not the free, fulfilled, and “bohemian” figure popularized by romantic ideas from another era. He or she is forced to take on multiple tasks (commissions, conferences, artistic and cultural education, workshops, etc.), the conditions of which—often precarious—are imposed or individually negotiated.⁵
            As elsewhere, power relations permeate subjectivities. To give an example that directly concerns me, a woman will be paid on average 18.6%⁶ less than her male counterpart. On top of this economic inequality, there are more structural obstacles: access to work remains deeply conditioned by material and geographical constraints. In France, figures from the Ministry of Culture remind us that one in two artists must live in Paris⁷ if they want any hope of working. An environment that is itself exhausting, breathless, saturated—pushing everyone to go beyond or to flee.

The observation is clear and aligns with that of poet and essayist Anne Boyer. The capitalist logic of individual responsibility is not only absurd but profoundly violent. Not everything is the result of personal choice: our trajectories are caught up in a web of historical, political and social determinations.
            It’s as if you deserved your cancer for eating too many fatty sausages and not enough broccoli, for drinking too much beer, for not running early enough in the morning.⁸

I know I'll burn-out, but I won’t deserve it.

“It’s 12:15… where are they?”

Samantha was waiting for the next train after the bus she took to the station was late. Dominique was back in bed after staying up all night with a sick child. Claudia had just received the keys to a new place after a quick decision to move and unpacking their bags. Martin was sitting in a Zoom waiting room reviewing their notes while wondering where everyone was. Sofia was sending a third follow up message waiting for an invoice. Charles was checking his calendar to see how to rearrange a meeting as a more urgent one had come up. 

Things come up. 

It’s easy to become excited about a project in the beginning and to jump in immediately before setting down on the calendar the dates for deadlines, follow up meetings, and check-ins. Excitement can easily turn into anxiety when not accounting for all of the unexpected parts that tend to turn up in the process of a project. 

I don’t remember exactly where we were sitting or standing, though I can picture a few places, but the phrase still sticks with me “Under-promise and over-deliver”¹. First impressions are important, but what about last impressions? Maybe this comes down to setting expectations, staying in contact when timelines shift, and giving yourself a little bit more time than you think a project might take. “Time has a way of filling itself up.” For anything that seems like it could take 3 hours, add 2, for anything that seems like it could take 3 days, plan on 5. 

I have not always been successful at doing this but in the constant negotiation of work I’ve found it helpful to account for all of the more uncertain parts of working before promising to have something done by a certain time and potentially not being able to follow through. 

Things like: how long will it take to hear back from the printer? Is there a chance another project that I have been waiting to hear back from will come through that I need to dedicate time to? How quickly do they expect me to respond to the questions that will inevitably come up? Will I be able to get enough sleep where I’m staying to have the energy to do this by the agreed time? Will a friend be visiting who I would like to spend an afternoon with showing them around?

It is important to be respectful of other people's time, as well as your own.“Life is hectic” and things come up, but it is already hectic and there are ways to prevent it from becoming more hectic than it already is (though some people tend to thrive off of pressure, especially in certain places and types of working environments). The best way I’ve found to handle this is to try and account for the unexpected as much as possible up front and to plan on something always coming up.

It is frustrating to set time aside for something only to find out that the meeting has been cancelled, or delayed enough that what you had planned for the rest of the day could have been done while waiting/anticipating them to show up and for them expecting to start right away to make up for the lost time. The more you understand what is happening in the background, the easier it becomes to gauge expectations and being able to meet each other in the middle. This comes from being able to say what is happening, checking in and either keeping to schedules or saying when things need to be shifted. If you’re not sure how to do something, say you’re not sure how to do something. If you can’t do something, say you can’t do it.

There is something of a myth in working as a free-lance designer where you can “make your own time.” While this can be true, I think it is dependent on projects and working relationships. The truth is often—at least as I have found it to be—that in those cases you are working more on other people's time than your own, whereas in an office you might have a set schedule of working hours. This has changed a bit more since the pandemic as people worked from home and found that as long as they do what they say they are going to do, everything is fine, regardless of how long it might take them to do it. Working independently, this falls on you to negotiate hourly rates or deciding on a flat-rate when the expectations of what you will do is clear or to clearly set boundaries on when you work and how much you can work on something. 

The key to all of this I think, though I am certainly not an expert at it at all, is to stay in touch with who you are working with to know where things are at and hope that they do the same for you. Everyone works in different ways and on different schedules. And sometimes constant check-ins can feel like they get in the way of the work itself, but when it comes to asking someone to be there at a certain moment, or vise-versa, to at the very least be able to say “something came up” or that “it needs more time.” It’s as easy as putting it on a calendar and setting a reminder, at least this is what has been working for me, for the most part, and is hopefully also a helpful reminder for others.

Samantha has two no shows in a row, with no response from who she is working with until two weeks later, now asking for something to be done as quickly as they can. Dominique makes his meeting on time, though the interruptions from his sick child distract from anyone being able to say entirely what they were hoping to say, at least Dominique’s collaborators have some sense of why there will be a delay in the project and why they were needing to push the meeting back. Claudia finds out that the new apartment is just as bad if not worse than the previous one and decides to work from a café, pushing back her work a few more hours again, leaving it up to the last minute. Martin receives an e-mail about working on a project after an initial conversation that took place months ago had since fallen silent. Sofia finally gets paid and now knows she can start on the project, though now weeks into the deadline, shortening her time to finish it. Charles puts on the Mekons “Where Were You” and signs-off for the day.”

I'm floating  

trying not to sink 

the salt touching my skin

I've been gardening

sleeping

listening

A presence of a new reality
practising methods

restless nights

I’ve been voicing 

needing 

mothering

finding

knowing

I feel the cold numbing my body

as I go deeper into the wave

I've been writing

I've been compiling

Arranging myself

fantasizing about the future

while whispering 

i'm an aquarius

DEEP LOOKING

OK – I know – everybody is obsessed with the Deep Listening, but I have this thing that is kind of similar but about looking. It’s like an exercise and one day I might write instructions or a guide. For now though, it is best to try it by letting a fleeting thing catch your attention, and let it unfold in front of you, as if in a daydream, and describe what happens. Sitting with sight. 

GETTING A DAY TIME SUMMER JOB

I am obsessed with things, in the most menial way – show me an object and I will probably love it (but not anthropomorphize, no, it is not THAT). Which is why I got a job sorting out clothes and STUFF for the Red Cross second hand stores in Reykjavík, to see if my thing love will withstand the pure WEIGHT of all of the THINGS flowing from containers. Maybe I can write about it. In the hallway by the break room, I noticed stacks of big boxes of dark chocolate digestive biscuits, and I’m already planning how many biscuits I could eat in a day.

But I’m dancing around the main topic – the biggest reason I got a daytime job is that the yearly summer thing I have been doing since 2018 is now over, and I might be having an existential crisis. I used to be a designer for a festival and we called it quits last year – amicably, favorably, all were relieved. I suffered many burnouts and potential ulcers, but as painful as it was, it was also ALIVE and playful and in a small place with a small amount of people, building something on the brink of elation or collapse, or sometimes just mediocrity. Ever since I figured out what design was (I want to say circa 2012?), this festival was my dream to work on, and then I got my dream job, and then it needed to end. I am not completely sure who I am outside of that, so here’s to finding out, from 8–16 on weekdays for three months. 

GETTING A WEEKEND SUMMER JOB

I decided to stop being full-time freelance (or actually, my freelance jobs didn’t pay enough for a few months) and now I work at a cup store selling cups – it’s a perfect place – my mind rests. The other day I was working, and no one had come in the store for about half an hour, so I started to write in my journal which I rarely do. All I could write about was that I played a song by a Danish artist and a Danish couple walked in (er I dansker?? spurgte jeg) and then as I played a French song a French couple walked in. This might be the only place where I’m content talking to tourists.

THINKING ABOUT HOW THEY INTERACT

Sorting old stuff people throw out vs. selling new fancy cups … oh they juuuuxtaposeeee.

LOSING THINGS

A few months ago, some bandits broke into my shared studio. They stole various things, some of no value, and others very expensive, but they also took two things that are very important to me:

Important Object 1: A softcover edition from the 70s of The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. The book was so worn out, I taped the first ~70 pages together at the spine. Inside, I placed a special bookmark I bought in a catholic shop in Mexico City. The bandits left the bookmark, which I’m happy about, but I would really really really love to get my book back. 

Important Object 2: My pencil case. Small, black suede, with a blue paint stain, filled with the exact tools I've collected that suit me perfectly, for drawing, for making, for emergencies. An electric eraser with two widths, the perfect mechanical pencil, one safety pin. A little note, extra hair tie. Bandaid. 

Bonus Unimportant Object (Not numbered): Apple Cinema 24’’ monitor from 2004, it was awful and made my eyes hurt and took up way too much space.  

They also stole paint, sketchbooks, tattoo equipment and materials for linocuts. Jackpot! The reach of their long fingers is incredible. I hope they’re tattooing each other and making prints. I hope they will return the other important objects. 

THIS JOKE I SAW ON REELS

NEVER UPDATING MY COMPUTER AND WORRY IF I HAVE BECOME STALE

I use pirated adobe software, and I have never researched whether it’s ok to update my computer. Will the programmes work? I don’t know, but better to not find out. It’s also great because then I don’t have any of the fancy new functionalities, except for the obsolete ones: photoshop 3D still works and I have pantone colors in indesign. But … maybe .. I need them … to be a better, more clever designer? Have I stagnated? Maybe I should just –

NOT REALLY HAVE ANY THOUGHTS

I started thinking of how the act of designing died when I started thinking about it. I love making things and I don’t love thinking about them, and I feel that everything I’ve made with too much intention has fallen flat, dead, grey, boring, beaten horse (I guess this might be why I feel so terrible at branding). But anyway – I stopped thinking about design, and instead tried to let it happen as it happens. Right now I am sewing drawstring bags for an exhibition, making signage for a gallery, exporting a catalogue, not without thought but mostly without planned intent. Operate on an educated guess, or informed gut feeling. 

MOVE AWAY TO DO ANOTHER MASTERS DEGREE

Does anyone have leads for a flat in Amsterdam or Utrecht?

Thought 0

This thought, direction, wish, fantasy, urge... points toward the never-ending and repeating desire for exploration. Somehow, dealing with something unfamiliar feels freeing. It doesn’t carry the burden of experience—if you could call it that. Maybe that’s just the honeymoon period talking.

This thought may actually be more of an urge, for it doesn’t need a particularly generous environment to arise. Maybe it’s also more of an ideal to be chased, as it's rarely caught. Thought 0 draws you toward expanding your view, going beyond the parameters set beforehand—whether by a collaborator or a client. It invites you to play with unfamiliar spaces, mediums, formats, and processes.

Thought 0 is a rollercoaster. It is loud, fast, and unapologetic. It’s easy to get caught up in its charm. But that also makes it easier for Thought 1 to lead you astray.

Thought 1

This thought is a constraint, a limitation, a restriction—but not the kind imposed on you, the kind you impose on yourself. I mostly feel it revealing itself during or at the end of a process, where I find myself wondering when and where something may have gone too far. When the view becomes so expanded that it loses focus.

If Thought 0 is an ideal, Thought 1 is reality. It has more to do with accepting reality than rejecting it. Thought 1 is guided by deadlines, hours in the day, money, paper, skill... Its voice is the voice of reason. At first glance, it can seem calming. Thought 1 provides a safe space.

But that space can also be limiting. It's easy to hide behind it, as it feels neutral and decontextualized. If Thought 0 is the young, rebellious one, Thought 1 is the older, conservatively cautious one.

From start to finish, and everywhere in between, Thought 0 and Thought 1 interchange with one another—coming one after the other. But because they are polar opposites, they, much like oil and water, don’t mix.

0 + 1 = 2, 3, 5…

I don’t know if extremes are ever a good thing. The more time passes, the more I feel that, by themselves, they’re too flat. My guess is that the interesting things happen in between—and that the in-between has to be actively imported into the process by the designer. The designer should facilitate a space where Thought 0 and Thought 1 come together and produce a 2, or a 5, or an 8...

I know this makes no sense mathematically or rationally. But I also believe that much of the practice of graphic design doesn’t have to chase a complete and objective truth. For me, this meeting point happens best when I’m sitting outside at a small table in a coffee shop—a place I use as a neutral zone, one of informality and normality.

In this place, Thought 0 and Thought 1 create an in-between: a Thought 5. Again, how that happens, I have no idea—and I don’t think I ever will. My role is simply to facilitate those moments.

I often feel like Menocchio the miller from Carlo Ginzburg's book The Cheese and the Worms, which by the way, is a book I have not read. But it’s fine, because I have read Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Menocchio describes the evolution of the world through the process of making cheese – a process he knew very well. Unfortunately he was burned at the stake in 1599 by the Roman Inquisition because his cheese cosmogony, obviously, did not align with the bible. 

Here is a sample of his cosmogony: all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. (Quoted from Wikipedia.)

It’s strange to think that someone would be burned for such beautiful prose. Such clear and simple analogies. He was guilty of trying to make sense of the world, nothing more.

I feel like Menocchio when talking about graphic design to non designers. It’s very niche so it takes a lot of “cheese” analogies to get the point across. And by “cheese” I mean any neighbouring or familiar subject that helps to describe graphic design. 

But it goes the other way as well. I often rationalise things that I don’t quite understand by drawing similarities with graphic design or visual arts.

Here is a recent example. A few years ago I became interested in spectral music, or spectralism as it is often called. It is somewhat complicated to understand for a non-musician. So I have been developing a cheese cosmogony of my own, to make sense of it. 

Here are some snippets:

As there are no pure colors in the physical world, they exist only as abstractions, there are also no pure sounds. 

When it comes to color then light is always reflecting on the original color from different neighbouring surfaces. In that sense a certain color that we see is always a mixture of several micro color tones. That is obvious.

The same thing happens with sound. Soundwaves bounce from different surfaces, like the body, or the material of the instrument and so several sounds get mixed up. This is called the overtone. Some notes that linger along the original or the intended note. 

When you pluck a chord on a guitar you can actually hear it when you pay attention. That slight high pitch is almost inaudible. Like the flicker of blue on top of a flame. 

In the seventies two French composers Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, with the help of computers, were able to analyze sound into spectra. They were able to identify the accompanying notes within a certain recorded sound.

They were able to see what physical sound actually consisted of. It was as if they were moving around with the pipette tool on a piece of sound. They wrote it all down and gave it to the orchestra to play and it sounded amazing!^*

This was the somewhat scientific approach, while the Romanian composer Horațiu Rădulescu was much more mystical. He opens it up in his book Sound Plasma, which, just like Cheese and Worms, I haven't read. It’s a bit too much for me to fully grasp, but his pieces like Iubiri** speak very clearly to me.

The several question marks that spectralism leaves fill me with fantasies and speculations which often bleed into my work as a graphic designer. For instance I have started to see color in a slightly different way. I appreciate small differences in hue and uneven color surfaces as endlessly appealing.

By having constant conversations and comparisons with music I have grown to think of graphic design as a temporal art. The moment of seeing and reflecting on a piece of graphic design takes place in time and that time of reflection becomes the prerequisite for the design to make sense.

Here another analogy with spectralism walks in. You can check out some of that on Spotify. Listen to it for 10-20 seconds, but that would be meaningless. It only starts to make sense when you take the allocated time. When you sit with the piece in the same room for its duration. 

I have grown to think of design in a similar logic. In my own work I have been playing with the idea of poor or uneventful design. It’s design that seems uncommunicative at first, but is full of small design decisions that will reveal themselves only when you use the design in its intended way. For instance if it is a book, then you notice the design when you read the book, not when you see the cover on Instagram. Or if it is an identity, then the seriality and distinctness of ideas will not be resolved at first, but will become apparent later through repetition and growth. An identity like this is less like a short slogan, but it is closer to a complex conversation that takes time in order to evolve and make sense.

Menocchio was more ambitious than me. He tried to understand the origin of life and the whole universe, while I am sticking to music and design. But a small notion by a local (spectralist) composer, Arash Yazdani*** made me reconsider. The most important thing for him, the starting point, is sound. There are other layers in his music as well: philosophical, personal, emotional, but he keeps these for himself. 

This sounds almost trivial, but it struck me and kept me thinking that the most important thing, the starting point for graphic design, is how a certain design looks. Without the visual there is nothing. There are other layers, of course, but they don’t have to be articulated. Your life events, your traumas, your hopes and fears, your political inclinations or inner jokes are all there, but just not for everyone. This made me see graphic design as a deeply personal activity. A real cosmogony.

1. Sometimes it feels like taking a leap requires a certain amount of stubborn naivety—a willingness to get yourself in over your head, to bite off more than you can chew, to tip off the edge of the cliff and figure it out on the way down. One might have the sense that if you really knew what you were getting yourself into, you might think better of the whole proposition. 
 

2. The Leap from design student to professional designer can be difficult to picture in part because it seems there are many different cliffs, diving boards, beaches and swimming holes to be approached in the professional world. Many students have been paddling in the waters already, some have already dipped in other kinds of pools and are adapting their stroke, some didn’t grow up near the sea, and have been feverishly consuming YouTube tutorials on the butterfly and the crawl. 
 

3. While in the air between solid ground and the next unknowable thing, it can feel like we have gravely misunderstood what was needed for this moment. Perhaps we are the wrong kind of creature altogether—we weren’t meant for water in the first place, and the reality of how unprepared we are for this new environment is rushing towards us, ready to flatten us on impact. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to reverse course in this moment, so one might as well enjoy the wind in your mane on the way down. 

* Something often (but not always) happens in the space just between certain failure, utter destruction and ego death, and the moment of impact. This occurrence can be profound, mysterious, and maybe semi-fabricated in hindsight, so we will not depict it here.

4. Hitting the water can be messy, and potentially sting a little. 
 

5. In diving, the people who hit the water with the least resistance are the people who have thrown themselves from the cliff many, many times before. In a recent open discussion on this topic, designer and educator Sean Yendrys posits that it takes around five years of working various jobs; for studios, for designers, in bars and restaurants and whatever else, for a recent design graduate to develop what might be called a sustainable independent practice. All dives look different, and imagining tens across the board might set one up for disappointment. 
 

6. Imagining ourselves on the other side of this transformation can sometimes feel like picturing a mythical creature with fins and gills, a hybrid being whose home is the ocean. This total arrival may itself be the myth, as one has observed time and time again, that people who have transformed themselves into mermaids may find that they are now wondering about a life with legs.

I am currently sitting at a desk in a fluorescently lit cube on the outskirts of Paris, awaiting my next 3 hour long French lesson. Each day, our teacher (Madame Rabiva) begins the class by asking one of us to write the date on the dry erase board in the front of the classroom. “Bonjour! Monsieur Taylor, Pourriez-vous écrire la date du jour au tableau?” I sheepishly walk to the board, take the almost empty dry erase marker and write, “Lundi, 21 Avril, 2025,” while mispronouncing each word in my best French impersonation. 

This course is required for most non-EU citizens seeking to extend their work visa or residency status. A certain level of French reading and writing is mandatory for renewing these aforementioned documents in France, and each person is required to take between 100 and 600 hours of language courses (I have been assigned 200), depending on your level of understanding. These classes, which happen every Monday through Thursday after my 8 hour job, are just one of the many requirements that are necessary for me to stay and work in Paris. 

While pursuing my Masters degree at the Estonian Academy of Arts, I was introduced to a number of remarkable graphic designers, all of whom seemed to be working on the most interesting books and cultural projects in Europe. By and large, the majority of my course mates and I had similar aspirations, which seemed like an inevitable outcome while being in the program. However, the harsh reality upon graduation (particularly for non-EU citizens) is that there are logistics that run contrary to those dreams. I find this realization to be a primary contributor to the post-art school depression that plagues so many young designers. 

Removing visas and permits from the equation for a second, there seem to be several challenges contributing to the inability to work exclusively with dream clients. For one, the cost of living has gone up in Europe. According to the European Employment Services (EURES), house prices in the EU almost doubled between the years 2015 and 2023.¹ It therefore becomes imperative to make more money. However, boutique design agencies can’t afford to pay recently graduated designers much, oftentimes because the “cool” clients can’t pay a lot. It is quite common for these studios to offer unpaid internships.² In Europe, ERASMUS provides recent graduates with supplemental income, but in the United States and other countries, you are left to fend for yourself. Due to this lack of financial support, many graduates must live off of their parents, a romantic partner or their life savings in order to maintain these op portunities. If you aren’t lucky enough to have that, then you’re kind of fucked. 

Now if we examine a freelance practice, there are even more challenges to consider. If you previously had your own studio, and you left for two years to pursue a degree, then it would behoove you to maintain those working relationships while in school. Otherwise, you hope the clients haven’t moved on to different designers, and try to rekindle the relationship that you put on hold. If you haven’t practiced graphic design previously, then you need to build up a rolodex of clients and hope that you get enough money in the meantime to make ends meet. 

If you don’t have a partner, parent or savings account that can pay for you to “live in the red” during the early part of your design career, then you must make compromises to survive. Sometimes that is going the corporate route, as big corporations and ad agencies pay more money. Maybe it is living with your parents, or an hour outside of town. Maybe it means working in a bar while designing on the side. Regardless, these compromises can contribute to an onslaught of negative thoughts about the trajectory of your career. 

Many of the tutors that I mentioned before, were lucky enough to live in places like Berlin, London or Amsterdam when it was cheap. They live in a rent controlled apartment or own their own place. The market wasn’t saturated with graphic designers, and the occupation was considered novel. With so many amazing artists and other creatives in those cities, it comes as no surprise that they found opportunities to create interesting work. A low supply of designers, with a high demand for graphic design made for an ideal opportunity. It is also worth noting that many European countries have universal health care, and much larger safety nets for artists and designers, with even more resources allocated in the past. 

To circle back to the visas and permits, these universal challenges are heightened when the country you are living in requires you to make a certain amount of money, and take mandatory classes 12 to 15 hours per week. There is very little room for projects outside of work. I have found it incredibly difficult, but absolutely necessary to pursue these projects in an effort to combat the post-graduate slump. 

In the grand scheme of things, these classes won’t last forever (several months), and a better understanding of French will make my time in Paris far more enjoyable. The work that I do for a small luxury activewear corporation is providing me with opportunities and tools to broaden my knowledge of graphic design, while the projects I do outside of work are opening doors for collaboration with artists and friends, both now and in the future. 

My classmate Sebastián from Mexico has just finished writing today’s date on the dry erase board, “Mardi, 29 Avril, 2025,” and Madame Rabiva has just asked me to introduce myself to the class, another daily ritual at my French class: 

Bonjour, 

Je m’appelle Taylor. 

Je viens du Texas. 

J’habite à Paris. 

Je suis graphiste. 

Disclaimer: My experiences dealing with visa and residency permits are limited to the countries of France and Estonia. That said, it seems somewhat comparable to many of my peers’ dealings with similar issues in other European Union countries. 

They met at school. In São Paulo. 2013 was a hot and raging year. Everyone was angry at something, or matching with someone. Rosa and her were already lovers, the riots pulled them into the streets. That’s when they started making work together. There was always the need to design a poster for these gatherings. Their bodies already knew each other, now their computers did too. It worked so naturally that they opened a studio. A good name attracted good clients. The two of them in a tiny room with ceiling fans. Then came Switzerland, an art residency. They went together, but only Rosa came back. The other girl fell in love with an EU citizen and stayed. Rosa received the studio divorce in the mail. Okay, she thought, that’s that.

They met in the desert. Rosa was on a breakup-vacation in Bolivia. It was off-season, cheap. She ran into this woman, chaotic, glowing. A gallery owner, rich in the way that means wild. It was someone she'd seen before in someone else’s house. They flirted on the salt desert, shared water, and got sunburned. A month later they were living together and the gallery suddenly had a new look. Rosa’s very own identity. It was fun until the woman decided she wanted to be a chef in Lisbon or something. She closed the gallery, never paid the last invoice. Rosa wrote several emails about it, the last one she let rot in drafts.

They met in a club. Rosa was 28, maybe 29, whatever age you are when your friend becomes a famous DJ. They shared a bathroom stall, some pills, some secrets. They started sleeping together. Later they shared an apartment. The DJ opened a club. Rosa did all the flyers. Bold fonts, striking colors, a lot of irony too, very cool. The DJ loved them. Everyone clapped. The posters took over the walls of their apartment. But fame became the third person in the bed. The DJ said she needed to go solo, not just musically. “It’s not about you,” she said. Rosa still had the design gigs, which somehow made it worse.

They met in a community center. Rosa was trying to reconnect with her Jewish side, whatever that meant. All PhDs and crochet circles and tension around Zionism. She didn’t expect to fall in love there. In the staff there was a smart girl, good posture. Rosa designed the new identity for the center. They kissed at the end of a meeting, then started having meetings just to kiss. The identity was never finished. Everything kept floating, the job, the relationship. Then the girl started a museum job in New York and ghosted the building, the community, Rosa. They bumped into each other in Berlin. It was summer. It was fine.

They met at the beach. This one is sweet. Rosa wasn’t looking for anything on that particular holiday. Just for a swim and hash. She asked a girl to look after her belongings and dipped into the sea. Later she thanked her with an ice cream, melting fast. It got messy and fun, and Rosa thought let’s not ruin this thing. She tried not to bring in work. They were happy for a while. Months later she logs into a Google Meet for a new architecture project and the client is already laughing. “Turns out the new architect I hired knows you,” he says. “She told me you are dating.” Rosa laughs too, sort of. She watches the screen flicker. The client says, “Small world.” No, it's a lesbian world, she thinks. Round and ridiculous.

The five of us (M, A, H, another M, and I) sit on a large boulder in the middle of a pine tree forest near Haapsalu. We fit perfectly, like a band on an album cover. On our way to this small resting place we pass a slow-worm (and look up its many other pejorative names), a tiny Amanda’s Blue and a surprisingly large Small Tortoiseshell. The first one seems to be a snake, but isn’t, the latter two are obviously butterflies. 

The boulder warms up our backs as we look up and talk about whatever comes to mind. We first discuss yesterday, and then move towards tonight. M mentions wanting to carve out time to work on an application for an open call for a performance festival somewhere cold. They’re looking for someone (or someones) to curate it all. I’m excited (this feeling comes quite naturally to me), and so I encourage M. A, however, thinks differently. He thinks M’s time seems to be occupied with other projects, all of which seem very exciting to me too. There’s now two little angels sitting on M’s shoulders (sitting on this boulder). 

     A argues that, with open calls, you never really know whether you’ll ever get paid for the labour you put into your application. Hell, they might even materialize your ideas without you ever knowing. I agree, I have to. 

I’m reminded of this one teacher, R, who, in the first or second year of my bachelor's, decided to screen (on DVD, I think) Lex Reitma’s 2012’s De Stijl van het Stedelijk (or The Style of the Stedelijk). The film talked me and my classmates through the process of an international design competition, set up by then-director Gijs van Tuyl, meant to commission a new visual identity for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I remember being critical of the film’s pacing, but interested in the process it portrayed. At the time anything design-related felt like an introduction still. Now, I apply for competitions and open calls on a regular basis, albeit, for much smaller projects and institutions. I also have been lucky enough to reap their fruits. The last ten minutes of the film I recall (vaguely, it’s been a while) how the tables turned. Van Tuyl appoints French designer Pierre di Sciullo as the competition’s winner, and then immediately, a scene cuts, to 2010, when Ann Goldstein becomes the museum’s new director who appoints Dutch Design duo Mevis & Van Deursen to replace di Sciullo before his work even saw the light of day. 

     The film ends with a shot of di Sciullo rolling around big metal letters in his backyard. Sun setting, shoulders and eyebrows pointing downward. Life’s not fair, competitions even less so, R proclaimed. I left the room feeling droopy then. And now, whenever I get a no back from an application, I envision myself in di Sciullo’s backyard. Rolling steel letters is our Sisyphean task, it seems. But there are more than a few ways to cope with rejection.

     I recall E telling me how one year she decided, as a New Year’s resolution, she’d hear at least ten nos in the following twelve months. Every time a no would appear in her mailbox she’d be at least a little delighted, and closer to her goal. Every once in a while a yes would be there where she didn’t expect it. 

     E also told me she started feeling less devastated from rejection, once a friend of hers explained how these committees and other deciding bodies, although they might seem opaque from the outside, truly aren’t that mysterious. Once you yourself participate in such or similar decision making (which her friend recommended her to do if she ever had the opportunity) you understand how none of this is personal, and no one actually dislikes your proposals. Also, oftentimes these bodies’ members vary massively from one year to another, so if it didn’t work out one time, you might be lucky the next.

     Sharing a cappuccino and a latte with N, some years ago, I recall they mentioned how they would (attempt to) no longer participate in any open calls. They’re more experienced, and also more well spoken than I am, so I very much appreciated their thoughts on the matter. In-between sips and Biscoff cookies, they made me aware of the many collective unpaid hours we spend working for institutions. It would be jarring to see them in an info-graph, they joked, and I agreed. 

     Around that time however, one thing I remember very much enjoying about open calls, was that it felt like a way in. It was then that I started to understand how many design jobs come to be over toasts at exhibition openings, or other kinds of personal referrals. I didn’t have many connections with working practitioners or institutions, and finding clients in the cultural scene felt (at times) inconceivable. Open calls seemed to be the way to puncture my way in.

     Now, still on this boulder, M shares this sentiment. She tells us a majority (if not all) of her work comes from open calls. M (the other M) agrees and says this might be true for many of our peers that work in the cultural field, specifically those that aren’t graphic designers. 

     It’s a little lottery game, but I still think it might be worth a shot, and the effort too, if M wouldn’t spend much time working on the application. We all agree it seems like it could be an exciting opportunity, that M would do such a good job, and that one thing could always lead to another. A pine cone falls behind us as A checks his watch.

     H and I’s bus to Tallinn leaves in ninety minutes, so we decide to head back. M climbs down the same shady ladder we used to climb up the boulder, three out of four rungs are still there, none are very sturdy-looking. Top rung breaks, M tumbles down, A jumps, without hesitating, to see if M’s alright. (She is!) I try to find an exit from behind, H from the side, M (second M) follows H but hits her head against a metal plaque saying ‘rare boulder’. There are no metaphors here, just a clunky sequence of events. After all, that’s how it goes sometimes. The walk back we’re followed by the same surprisingly large Small Tortoiseshell (the butterfly from earlier) and the approaching dawn of a somewhat dreaded Monday morning. 

In the bus (amazing leg space, student discount, passing by four storks, sitting next to H who’s watching some show, I interrupt him twice and then try not to do it again) I read Agnes Isabelle Veevo’s In my healing era. Her feelings of anxiety that stem from financial and emotional instability, make me think of M’s (Sunday) evening plans. 

     Open calls don’t disclose beforehand whether or not you’ll be able to pay this month’s rent, and taxes, “and health insurance!!” That being said, I do concurrently believe that a field as impenetrable as graphic design benefits from these brief moments of opening up—though of course, not as a systemic replacement for fairly paid opportunities.

     Much to ponder about, but H’s sparkling water makes a big fuss on the backseats, and we have to excuse ourselves to a sleeping lady, all dressed in stripes, now awake and wet. The bus decides to take a sharp right turn as we arrive at our familiar bussijaam. 

I recently witnessed a little spat on the timeline between infamous graphic design meme account @ethicaldesign69 and designer / writer / educator Silvio Lorusso. The conflict had something to do with unions after some harsh criticism towards the latter. I do not completely recall what the discussion was about, and what exactly it resulted in—but it had something to do with whether designers are workers, unionisation and Lorusso being anti-union. It brought to the forefront a question that I have been thinking about for some time. One of labor conditions, labor relations, labor organizing and unionisation in the “creative industries” and graphic design in particular.

The field has, like many others, been influenced by wider developments in how labor relations have evolved in recent decades. Regulated full time employment is oftentimes unheard of. Topics like precarity, being overworked, legal and economic uncertainty, bad clients, bad bosses, unpaid and late invoices, the under- and unpaid internship-rodeo, working multiple jobs, lack of access to social security are common experiences across the “industry” and come up frequently in conversations with friends who are graphic designers or work in other fields that are part of the “creative industries”. An example; after being asked on the topic, I remember a recent comment by an established successful graphic designer that they would probably never retire because they do not have a pension plan and have not thought about one too.Especially when working as a freelancer, or in smaller practices, struggling, poor working conditions, and a non-existing work-life balance seem like an almost inevitable part of the process. There rarely seems a way out of this besides grinding harder, being better, taking more (poorly paid) jobs, doing another (underpaid) internship to somehow at some point “make it”. All in all, things are not necessarily going great!

One possible way to address some of these issues is to organize with peers to alleviate some of these pressures, and push for change in the industry. The idea of actually organizing with others still seems alien to many in a field where myths of individual creativity and “authorial genius” still play a big role in how people perceive the work they do. But organizing can take different forms of intensity and involvement. Each of them having their own specifics, but the general underlying principle is to find strength and support in collectivity and networks. For the occasion of Mayday I have tried to compile a few ideas on this matter.

Engage in Information Sharing / Join Educational Networks

An easy first step towards organizing is talking to others. This might appear obvious, but at the same time it is an important thing to remember. Especially because in general there still is a pervasive culture that prevents issues like compensation, working conditions, etc. from being addressed beyond one’s immediate circles. In recent years there has been some initiative to create online repositories and platforms to share resources, information, experiences and gather data and foster exchange about different topics such as salaries and internship experiences which give at least some insights into aspects that are relevant to starting out and working in graphic design and are fairly low-effort to participate in. But there is also value in joining or starting initiatives that meet in-person to exchange experiences, share information and learn together such as reading groups or learning initiatives like Evening Class, a London-based “experiment in self-organised education” that started in 2016, but is currently not active anymore. These more involved and organized groups can provide a platform for connection, discussion and learning, informal mutual support and help foster a sense of community around looking to address the struggles that are shared by the members and be a great starting point for actually trying to affect change in one's local scene / environment.

Become a member in a professional and trade associations

Professional and trade associations are usually nonprofit organisations that serve the interests of members who work in the same professional field. They are not in any sense a form of grass-roots organizing but can offer up some resources and support-structures. They mostly run on a paid membership model with some sort of qualification control to regulate entry into the association. This is quite frankly not an ideal model because it automatically excludes anyone who is not able to afford the fees, or who does not fit in their specific criteria for admission. If membership is gained it grants access to different perks and ressources like legal guidance on working conditions, intellectual property, contract templates, workshops and networking-opportunities amongst other things. Besides that, they might conduct studies about different aspects of the profession like compensation, do lobbying work, organize conferences or educational programs and in some cases offer up free resources regarding pay, insurances and general legal topics on their websites. Many associations are organized nationally and are mostly catering to that specific context. Some examples are the Berufsverband Kommunikationsdesign in Germany (which offers a nice wage-calculator), the Association of Swedish illustrators and graphic designers, Swiss Graphic Design Union and AIGA. A quick google search containing “COUNTRY” + “graphic design association” will show whether such an association exists wherever you’re based and what it could offer up. 

Join a Trade Union

Unionisation in graphic design is an interesting yet difficult topic with relatively little information and discourse around it. It is quite probable that most graphic designers have never even thought about joining a union. This might have to do with the fact that there currently is not really a culture of labor organising in the field in general, and that there are almost no unions that are geared towards graphic designers specifically—with the notable exception of the UVW Union Designers and Cultural Workers Branch in the UK. Another reason is that many traditional methods of work-place-organising seem difficult to implement in a field like graphic design, where self-employment and freelancing are wide-spread, and often sought after modes of working with labor conditions changing constantly and relatively rapidly which established unions have been slow to adapt to, which—among many other reasons—might make them unattractive to join. Still, there are some opportunities that might be worth looking into, depending of course on local context and legislation. And even if some of the traditional methods of trade-unionism like collective bargaining might not be workable in specific subsections of the creative industry there are a number of ways of support a union can offer even if one is self-employed. These can range from legal advice, and support to debt collection assistance, to helping to connect to other members in the same sector. 

Some larger trade unions have general branches for freelancers and self-employed workers like for example ver.di in Germany. An interesting overview of trade unions accepting self-employed workers in the EU can be found here. Next to larger unions there are also a number of more grass-roots organisations like the aforementioned UVW or the FAU in Germany that might be more interested and open to also engaging in more radical forms of action. In the United States there is also the Freelancers Union. And even if many of these unions do not have branches specifically geared towards graphic design, the resources they offer, as well as the opportunity to build solidarity and work against unfavorable developments in the labor market (after all, many issues that graphic designers struggle with are not exclusive to the field) might be a worthwhile reason for joining a union in any case.

I went to a concert recently and learned from my friend that one of the musicians used to be an office worker who left her former job behind to become a sound artist. I’ve always been amazed with people that can make a very radical career change. I’ve fantasized over whether that could ever be me and what could possibly my new vocation be. A flower shop owner? A tour guide? While these professions seem very exciting to me, the truth is I’m incredibly happy that I managed to find something I can actually do that I enjoy—graphic design—and so giving that up seems like a futile move, but never say never of course. I’ve found, though, that for me it is important to regularly engage myself in other activities—something for my own enjoyment; something that I’m allowed to be terrible at with no consequences.

I learned about David S

Late to everything as I am, I recently became aware of the work of American writer David Sedaris. I’ve been listening to recordings of him reading his short stories on Youtube before going to bed, falling asleep with a giggle.

Through one of his appearances on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2018 I learned of his rather unusual pastime, which he took up when he moved to England: he spends his days picking up trash in the village of Rackham in West Sussex where he is currently residing: “It’s like an 8 hour a day job. I have an outfit. I pick up trash for 8 hours a day. I just think of it as my job. But people see me and they just think that I’m crazy. […] If there was a Broadway play called “Hobo”, that’s what I’m dressed as.”¹

David Sedaris (second from right) and the bin lorry dedicated to him by Horsham district council. Photo: Publicity image

Sedaris worked odd jobs before he started to earn his living as a writer. He is well-known for his stories about working as a Christmas elf in the department store Macy’s when he first moved to New York. I learned that while he was living in Paris he was cleaning apartments for four days a week² — possibly what led him to picking up the same activity when he moved to England, just without a monetary reward this time. I wanted to know a little more about how Sedaris divides his time between writing and cleaning the streets, so I did some more digging and came across his Masterclass episode where he describes his daily routine:

I used to write in the evening. And then I quit drinking. When I quit drinking and sat down in the evening I thought: I don’t know if I can do this, because there should be booze on my table. So I thought I’ll change the time of day that I write because I’m not used to having booze on my table at 10 o’clock in the morning. So I started writing in the morning. And then eventually I was able to write in the morning and at night as well. I usually get up and go straight to my desk. I start by writing in my diary. And then I turn to whichever essay I’ve been working on. I work from 10 to 1.30. And then I go out and pick up garbage off the roads until 8 o’clock at night. And then I sit down at my desk for another hour and work some more. And then I’ll have dinner. Sometimes I’ll go back to work after dinner. But usually not.³

The amateur

The majority of practices that served as an example for me as a graphic design student were all people that worked relentlessly; their work was their passion. Alongside applied projects they took part in exhibitions or created ones of their own, participated in book fairs and so on. In other cases they would just work rather long hours—partly because of need, but also because they enjoyed what they were doing. In short their life was centered around their work. Back then I strived to have a similar practice one day. But quite early on I learned that I had to find my own way of working. As much as I enjoyed the profession, as well as the freelancer lifestyle, I was also interested in other things and had to find a way to accommodate everything in my schedule.

Over time I got into a rhythm where fairly regularly I had some longer pockets of time between projects. In reality that actually meant that probably I didn’t have enough work, but I could make ends meet and in truth I felt like the breaks were needed for my own sanity. As an art school graduate but also as somebody that’s simply used to being busy, I didn’t want to let that time go to waste. Sometimes I did some prep work for upcoming projects or worked on putting together a new assignment for my class (of course sometimes I also just binge-watched TV series, or spent time making notes for projects that never ended up happening). Every now and again that pocket turned out to be around one and a half months long. I was keen on using that time in a more fruitful, but possibly also more fun way. I started to give myself prompts for “projects” that didn’t really serve any practical purpose. 

During my studies at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem I had run a very informal self-service bar (ironically at some point nicknamed the “Rubbish bar” as it was situated next to a large trash can) in our studio space as an extension of my temporary role as the librarian of the school. 

That, and my general interest in beverages at the time, led me to creating various events that were one way or another bringing people together around drinks and food (snacks?). An example: In the summer of 2016 Celina Yavelow, Freja Kir and René Put were working on a project called “Wat nu Koetsier?” where they asked designers to create ads in the spirit of Dutch artist Hans Koetsier for the Amsterdam-based newspaper Het Parool. Instead of providing them with a straight-forward design, I used it as an excuse to advertise a barbecue, which I decided to spend one entire month planning, pickling vegetables and creating drinks of various kinds. I worked on two more events with a similar prep time that took place at Kunstverein Amsterdam; with my friend Lieven L we ran an informal bar night where we made cocktails at each other's houses and invited a mystery guest.

BBQ at my place in the autumn of 2016. Photo: Laura Pappa

Untitled event at Kunstverein Amsterdam on 12.11.2015. Photo: Lotte Schröder

It was a hobby of mine of sorts, though I never really called it that. I definitely had no wish to explore that interest in a professional way, quite the contrary. I embraced knowing largely nothing about the field: whenever I picked up a book on distilling, brewing, fermenting or wine production I probably got through a dozen of pages and then dozed off, never to return to the book again (quite the contrary to other hobbyists that are keen on mastering a craft).

The amateur takes classes

A year or two later I developed a nasty back ache as a result of regular desk work, or let’s be real: decades of not doing any physical exercise whatsoever aside from a casual dance session here and there. That made me pick up rowing, a not-so-hidden secret gem of Amsterdam that hadn’t entered my consciousness until a friend recommended it to me. I started taking rowing classes with the thought in mind to be able to go out on my own. I really enjoyed the classes, going out on the water with a handful of other rookies, learning to manoeuvre between large and small boats on the Amstel river. The learning process was spread over multiple years as I was preparing to row in different types of boats; eventually I had a team of sorts none of whom took rowing very seriously — just the type of environment I was after. 

Rowing on the Amstel river (I’m third from the left). Photo: unknown

I can’t really place all these activities on a timeline, but I soon (if not at the same time) started to take driving lessons (which took a million years as I kept flunking the driving exam), I took swimming “lessons” with a friend who used to do competitive swimming, I took hip-hop dancing lessons with some friends, I took part in an urban herbology course which entailed regular walks in the city as well as some workshops. I also had a brief stint in learning to garden with two friends of mine. A few years ago I took a course in type design—I know this sounds more professional, but the truth is I was mostly in it for the fun. My most recent hobby is taking improv comedy classes, which I’ve been busy with a little over a year now and I feel like I’m not done with it just yet. 

Me (right) apparently losing it during an improv show. Photo: Chee-Wai Chan

I really enjoy having parts of my week dedicated to learning of some kind, and spending time with other people while doing it. Tipping one’s toes into different types of skills is very rewarding—and becoming an expert is not something that I’ve ever been concerned with (even in graphic design), so a fear of failure has never been an issue. I like most of these activities enough to keep doing them for a much longer period but that would mean doing no work at all and I wouldn’t know how to survive that way, nor would I really want to. That means I’ve had to resort to a sort of not-rotating rotation system for my extracurricular activities, but I do hope some of them will reappear at some point in my life. What doesn’t help is that I have a ridiculously bad memory—if you asked me now about some rowing knowledge, I would 100% not be able to answer you. But I can only hope that there’s at least a muscle memory of some kind.

Other hobbyists in my circle

As David S proves, there’s pastimes of a million different kinds and formats. I would like to highlight some, focusing on friends and family each of whom has a hobby of sorts. I asked them what role that activity plays in their lives.

Thomas M helps to sum it up

I read Utopia by Thomas More during my early art academy days and it left a great impression on me. I’m not sure how much of it I really understood at the time, but there’s certain aspects of the book that still linger in my mind, mostly how More writes about work, productivity and leisure time. Here’s some of the elements I can recall from the book: there’s a six-hour working day; everybody learns a craft from a master (a type of internship perhaps) and you can also obtain multiple skills; spare time which there is a lot of is encouraged to be spent on learning—reading and going to lectures, listening to music, doing sports and gardening.

I’m a great advocate for short work days, as well as taking longer breaks for holidays, or simply taking time off. This is the only way that I can continue to enjoy the work—by regularly taking some distance from it, and spending time on something else. This is also the case short-term. Thomas M proclaimed there should be no lounging on the job, but some lounging is absolutely essential to get something done. 

As for spare time, as much as I like sitting around and staring at the ceiling or browsing Youtube like there’s no tomorrow, I also enjoy a more active leisure time. Reading and going to lectures, listening to music, doing sports and gardening sums it up rather well (ok I’m not the biggest reader these days and my gardening skills are meagre). I find the idea of learning multiple crafts in one’s lifetime fascinating. While for Thomas M it was perhaps with the purpose of finding the one skill that really suits somebody, I’m more drawn to the idea of learning multiple things for no other reason than just tipping one’s toes into different pots to get a taste of various fields, but also to have other interests outside of work. Not to mention the possibility of meeting new people from other backgrounds and walks of life.

Continuing to learn is of course essential to any practice, but I see as much value in learning things you might have no real use of, things that are entirely out of your comfort zone or that have no apparent overlap with your existing skill-set. This brings us back to the subject of hobbies. While hobbies often have a learning component, for me a hobby also suggests simply spending time with an activity and the people that come with it. Hobbies don’t have the weight of work—nobody has any real expectations from you, unless you yourself do—nor is your livelihood dependent on it. A hobby can have any shape or form, as long as it offers you something different from your day-job and gets you out of your routine. 

And if you don’t know where to get started with finding one, you can always just go and pick up some trash in your neighbourhood. You don’t even need to call it a hobby.

You all finished the EKAGDMA in consecutive years starting from the first one. Do you feel like the program has gone through a change during these years?
 

Agnes Isabelle Veevo (graduated in 2024)

I was just finishing my BA when the MA started in the next room and it has been crazy to see the development over the years. I feel like it’s simultaneously becoming more and less chill. More in the ways that people are really playing around with the experiments, specifically something I’ve noticed more this year. Less in a way that the program’s aspirations are also definitely becoming bigger and bigger which means more work and possibly more stress. But I am saying all of this from a good place. I love seeing the development and I love the things the program is doing. Maybe it’s just FOMO because during my time we didn’t have projects like this. 

Diandra Rebase (graduated in 2022)

YES. When I started my studies in the program, it was the peak of COVID, so there were a lot of restrictions, which we all remember. The program was still new and had to constantly adjust to whatever rules were in place, which was already a lot to handle. It had just started its life with the faculty staff trying to learn and adapt simultaneously, making it complicated for everyone. I sometimes like to think of our year as the pilot episode — it had a strong starting point, meaning it was successful enough for people to want to continue teaching and for new students to apply. But like any pilot, it would fine-tune itself in the upcoming episodes. That pilot episode, which lasted two years, was tough, but even then, I could already see so many improvements being made for the next group of students.

Patrick Zavadskis (graduated in 2023)

I can’t tell exactly from the evident distance that I now have with the course, but in general I am sure many things are different as well as that some things will never change. 

When I started in the second batch of students in the programme, then that was the first time that there were first and second year students simultaneously and as a result there were some growing pains at the time. I think it was mostly because of the programme being so new back then. The differences in every year seem to depend on the two sets of first year and second year students, how they work and operate separately and together, both in assignments and generally in the studio. That shapes a huge part of the studies and it seems that there’s great consideration to how admitted students will work together in the programme.

On the other hand when I previously said that some things never change, I meant that now whenever I see the programme online on social media or physically see the third floor corridor filled with posters at EKA, then everything still looks familiar – same as it ever was. There’s a certain vibe to the programme. I feel at least that it’s been similar ever since the very beginning.

 I happened to notice that none of you went to another country to study/work/do an internship after your MA studies which is quite popular among other students. Why is that so? 

Patrick

Already before starting my studies in the MA I expected to eventually go back to my previous job where I already worked before the programme (a design studio called Stuudio Stuudio in Tallinn) and since my colleagues were already eager to have me back one day after graduating, then I didn’t think too much about it and went back to work. I graduated from the EKA GD BA programme in 2020, worked for less than a year and then went to do the MA programme. Then when the MA was done I decided to take a breather and not take on another frontier right away, like go to a bigger country and do an internship in a type studio or something like this. I sometimes daydream about going to live and work somewhere else, but it seems like I’m in this constant cycle of unfinished business here in Estonia. 

To answer your question more clearly, then I found that the programme trained me to be a certain type of designer and paved a comfortable road to go deeper into that niche, but at the time of graduating I felt like I needed to go back to the opposite extreme again to ruminate and reflect on the past few years and go over some things. I’m forever grateful for the steps I took in the MA thanks to everyone involved and I don’t think it’s something that sort of progress can just disappear. Today I’m still ruminating and it’s been two years, I haven’t even opened Glyphs since then… well, until a few weeks ago…

Agnes Isabelle

I actually did an internship in the middle of my studies during the summer between the two years, in a studio in Mexico City. In this program we also had a lot of chances to travel and meet people, so I didn’t really feel the need to do another internship or move abroad again. I lived abroad for a few years before my studies also, so it wasn’t something I wished for. I also had a job lined up after graduation so I wanted to have a moment of rest before starting that. I think it’s more common because everybody else is already away from their homes so it’s easier to go to another place after graduating. I decided on an MA in Tallinn on purpose, I love living here. 

Diandra

During my studies, I worked full-time in my first advertising agency to pay for my studies and accommodations, which motivated me to look for an internship abroad after graduation. I became obsessed with moving to Berlin — almost like falling for a new partner — fantasising about my future, from the exciting honeymoon phase to sitting in a rocking chair with a few wrinkles and a MacBook beside me, reminiscing about it all. I liked Berlin when the program was happening there, and the idea stuck. I was so convinced that I gave my landlord two months’ notice after graduation. But when September came, I started avoiding the people I had proudly told about my move. I hadn’t sent out any portfolios or even thought seriously about where I would intern. Part of this obsession came from feeling like everyone in my class (even if it wasn’t everyone) was moving to Berlin. I convinced myself that staying in Tallinn meant failure — dramatic and untrue, but it felt real at the time. Looking back, I realise it was a lot of post-graduation anxiety. As they say, sometimes you have to see something a thousand times before you truly see it.

Summer passed, and I found myself without an apartment, still clinging to the story that I was leaving soon. I invented “No Decision October,” permitting myself not to have an answer. At the end of October, a former colleague messaged me about two young guys looking for a graphic designer for a project. It felt like a good distraction, but at the meeting, I realised I had misunderstood, and it was a job interview to work for their agency. I said I’d think about it — four hours later, I accepted. I decided to give the advertising world one more chance before quitting the industry. In hindsight, I wasn’t ready to move somewhere unstable and scary. I just needed safety and someone to save me from my anxiety. I never thought I’d find peace wrapped in the arms of capitalism. Spoilers - I’m still working there and it’s pretty cosy.

Do you feel more confident and can navigate better in your work/freelance work/other projects after completing your MA?

Diandra

Not at first. Right after graduation, I had success amnesia. I immediately forgot everything I had gained during my studies and felt like I did after finishing my BA — not fully hatched. I didn’t feel I had accomplished everything I wanted and wasn’t confident enough to believe I deserved the degree. Even when I was invited to work for another ad agency (where I’m still at) as an art director, I hesitated more over the thought that I didn’t have the skills and knowledge to be one, rather than admitting to myself that I had decided to stay in Tallinn. I’m aware that this also screams impostor syndrome.

Luckily, that feeling passed pretty quickly. After starting my new position, I realised that the EKAGDMA bubble, where I had just taken myself apart, is a privileged environment where time moves much slower, allowing you to reflect and think deeply about your work. In everyday agency life, where time is literally money. People don’t care or have the resources to question your concepts or push your boundaries. Sometimes, I still find more space with freelance projects, which I’m happy to take on occasionally. They are usually lower-paid, which often gives you more freedom and time.

Agnes Isabelle

I think yes. I feel like I ‘found’ myself and my style during my studies. I feel like I had an opportunity to try out some stuff and see what works and what doesn’t. The program being as intense as it is also really helps with working under pressure, so that’s been a great help actually. 

Patrick

I am definitely much better organized both in my everyday and freelance work projects. My primary focus during my studies was type design and most of us – the students, teachers and visiting critics – operated in contemporary art and culture fields regardless of expertise. This is to basically say that I found that the student (for the most part) will learn about how to navigate and work around those parameters. I feel that despite this distance now between me and the programme, much of it applies to any situation where I need to get things done. 

Besides work processes it was, and I’m sure still is, a good place to cultivate your interests further. My final project was about remakes and to this day I notice how the topic encompasses many things I surround myself with. In my head I fantasize about a few obvious continuations to what I had started in the programme that I could build upon in the future. I think that subconsciously my mind is still enveloped in the themes and topics I explored in the MA and it applies to much more than solely graphic design. There’s a part of my brain reserved for “personal projects in progress” and thanks to the MA it’s filled with lists of books to read and titles for potential projects to make and they all make sense in the context I got to build for myself in the MA. Now it’s a matter of where and how much of my resources to put into which project and currently, in terms of “navigating work”, it’s more about trying to narrow the scope of my plans and saying no to whatever seems unimportant right now. There’s much of that in the MA too, so it’s a familiar feeling.

What do you think of the future as a graphic designer that has done the MA program in Estonia? Do you think the design landscape offers enough opportunities for young graphic designers?

Patrick

My first thought is to state the obvious that Estonia is small, which means that there is only so much room for designers to comfortably run their specific types of practices that the programme prepares them to have. This is not to say that it’s impossible to successfully do your specific type of design practice, but it makes perfect sense for graduates to go to places where there are better opportunities and systems in place. I think there are plenty of opportunities for designers to work in Estonia, but I can’t imagine all of the projects to be exclusively Estonian. The potential area that could welcome and offer a desirable project by art or cultural instituations for a graduate from the MA is narrow. It makes sense for designers from the MA to work with other types of makers either internally from EKA or elsewhere, but I notice a trend in which most makers (artists, crafters, musicians etc) want to design their stuff themselves. There’s still an exotic aura to the things coming out of the MA and I find myself in conversations with people outside of the MA programme trying to understand how the aesthetic and approach fits in with its surroundings. I can imagine more people from the programme going and offering their methodologies and expertise in work that’s in demand locally. I personally feel that in the programme students are taught to build an independent body of work and identity that can then be applied to the projects they take. That seems, at least as of now, a difficult undertaking here in Estonia.

In my case I again have to add to what I’ve already previously stated that I learned not only about how to be a (type) designer, but that the programme offers much more than just that. Helped me better to position myself in my context and understand how I could fit in and apply myself. I have a history of being too careful about making myself known and public and time has now proven that I don’t take even the smallest steps if my teachers and course mates aren’t there to push me.

Diandra

I can only speak about Estonia; honestly, the answer is no. Economically, we’re going through a difficult time — taxes keep rising, cutbacks are happening across different fields, and many people are losing their jobs. The more desirable projects for EKA graduates usually come from the cultural field, which is severely underfunded compared to countries like the Netherlands or Germany. As a result, there’s often little to no budget for graphic design. Friends tell me they would love to hire me for exhibition design, but their entire budget for graphic design was 100 €, so they did it themselves because there was no way to pay someone fairly.

I still get freelance projects from time to time, but not many, mostly because I’m not great at social networking. Just being good at your craft isn’t enough; you have to be connected, too, at least from my experience. Or maybe I’m just being dramatic, haha. The projects I get are often low-paid, to the point that if I laboured according to the budget, I could only afford to work on them for a few days, even though I usually spend a week or more on each one. Of course, there are probably some well-paid projects out there, and I assume (and hope) they go to full-time freelancers. I’m lucky to have a job at an agency, but I’ve also made a conscious decision to prioritise stability, even if it means passing up more exciting cultural work. That’s why it sometimes feels especially frustrating when so many talented and freshly graduated designers are struggling to see cultural institutions award projects to designers based outside Estonia (who don't operate in the Estonian economy). There are only a few major competitions each year that can bring more visibility and better pay to graphic designers here. It’s a sad situation from an economic perspective, especially since for freelancers in Estonia, finding work internationally isn’t always realistic. I wouldn’t be as critical (and my criticism is really directed only at the institutions and/or people making these decisions) if the cultural sector here were better funded and there was more work to go around. But then again, I’m not sitting on any juries, and I don’t necessarily see myself as someone entitled to those projects either, because I’m working full-time.

Agnes Isabelle

To be completely honest, I think having this MA has been more of a disadvantage for the local jobs. I simultaneously feel over- and underqualified and I feel like this is what the big bosses also see when they would look at my job applications. But this is more for the marketing side of design jobs. In the cultural scene there are basically two-three jobs, if even that and then I think the degree comes in handy. 

What do you consider the most valuable thing you gained from the program?

Agnes Isabelle

The overthinking (in a good way). The people. The contacts. The teachers, both from the office and who were invited as guests. I think we got the best variety of designers and artists to talk to about our works and I will forever miss having this opportunity again.

Diandra
Knowledge and people. After my success amnesia was over, I could finally reflect on how much I had gained and evolved through the program. Even though I felt so much left unsaid and unfinished, it was a fresh breath of air to continue learning and working on my own. The program was never meant to start and end within itself — it was meant to give you a starting point that pushes you to continue independently in whatever interests you.

From fellow students to teachers, it was inspiring to learn from them, see their work, and, even more importantly, be close to their thoughts and processes. The space that the teachers and students create together is really special and a privilege. I can only thank the faculty staff, visiting teachers, and my coursemates for this.

Patrick

Not to objectify them as they're not “a thing” per se, but my course mates. The MA is best at connecting people and it happens in my ways. But if I had to choose a thing, it’d be the graduation hat by Eleonora. 

Every year just before the Christmas break I perform a specific ritual. The Adobe™ dance. The ritual starts with me sitting down in front of my computer, usually after putting the task off for at least a couple of days to a week and preparing myself mentally for what is about to come. I login into the Adobe Creative Cloud web platform and navigate to the Account management section. I am there with one goal and one goal only. To bump my recently raised subscription cost from the newly applied 30 or so euros back down to a somewhat more reasonable yet still infuriating 15 to 20 euros. Via the “Navigate Plan” button I commence the process of cancelling my subscription. Of course I have no intention to cancel my subscription.

After all, I am fully locked into the ecosystem. I have memorized and committed to muscle memory (almost) every shortcut that I could possibly ever want to use. I use the filetype integration between Illustrator and After Effects all the time, link files between Photoshop and InDesign and send InDesign packages to collaborators and clients. This means that I am also locked into paying a monthly subscription fee for using this ever stranger and more convoluted suite of softwares that since 2012 is sold exclusively through the SaaS (software as a service) model. If you’re not as much of a wuss as me (in my defence I’m conditioned by growing up in Germany—a country that is notorious for cracking down on piracy) there are of course ways to acquire access to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications without having to pay for them… 

But back to the Adobe™ dance. 

After a strangely stressful click-through through all the cancellation dialogs that at some point along the way threaten me with having to pay an exorbitant early cancellation fee—which interestingly was outlawed in the US a while ago—I arrive at the gates to the place that will hopefully save me 100 to 200 euros for the coming year. A card that invites me with the following prompt “Let's talk: check for a custom deal.” to a chat with customer support. I take one last deep breath and click the button to connect. After a short wait I get connected to what appears to still be a real person (let’s see for how long) and begin to explain my problem. I used to be more cautious in this interaction with this but after literally years of experience I now tend to skip the small talk and get straight to the point usually by explaining my conundrum with a variation of the following message: “Hello, my subscription price was recently upgraded to 30 euros a month. Unfortunately this is too expensive for me as I am still a student and living on a budget. Is there any way you might be able to help me out with this?”. After some back and forth and an obligatory pause after a: “Let me check what options I might be able to offer you.” I get presented with the offer to renew my subscription for a year at a price somewhere between 15 and 20 euros a month. Score! I think to myself, somewhat (ridiculously) pleased with my success. What follows is some more administrative back and forth and after the new contract is confirmed and signed chat style via me typing “I agree with the terms and conditions and confirm the contract” or something along those lines. After that the year's Adobe™ dance is finally concluded by thanking the Customer Support employee on the other side of the check box and giving them a very-happy-smiley-review via the quality control email that hits my inbox shortly after.

To top it all off I usually post a story with an ironic and very funny caption to inform the world about this little ritual of mine and encourage people who inquire about it to try it for themselves. I have received feedback that success of this maneuver is apparently not guaranteed—even though it has worked for me without failure in the 8 years that this subscription has been running.

To me this yearly dance serves as a reminder that there is a discussion to be had about the (technological) tools we use and the implications this has on our work. And while, realistically, I will stay locked into the Adobe ecosystem for the foreseeable future, I feel that it important to keep raising awareness that there are alternatives out there and that especially in educational context there should be more emphasis on exploring those in order to make them more widely adopted and subsequently more feasible to pick up for others. 

So as a closing note I want to offer up some resources and tips and tricks for anyone out there looking to pay as little as possible to the corporate behemoth that is the Adobe Corporation.

1. Find a way to gain access to the Adobe Creative Cloud Applications without having to pay for them. (pirate flag emoji)
2. Find a CC-subscription boo. The applications can run on two devices concurrently so find someone to split the bill with.
3. Start your own tradition of doing the yearly Adobe™ dance. Most likely this advice is for students only but you can always try and see what happens if you run through the cancellation dialogues!
4. Jump ship! There are numerous alternatives for each of the apps that are included in Adobe’s portfolio. Do they offer the same level of integration or adoption in the “industry”? Mostly no, but it’s still not a bad idea to check them out. One list of such softwares can be found here. Another one here. Usually a quick online search will throw up a myriad of options.
5. Build your own or help build open source software tools. While this might seem like a very difficult thing to achieve, it is easier than one would think and currently the only way to build a better future (for design software).

This text was written after talking to Maru Calva, a Mexican graphic designer who currently works at Proyectos Ninguém, a graphic design studio in both Mexico and Puerto Rico. 

Aeromoto was a public library founded by Maru Calva, Mauricio Marcín, Jerónimo Ruedi, and Macarena Hernández. It first opened in 2014 in a space at Colonia Juárez and closed eight years later in a different location in Mexico City‘s Historic Center. I reached out to Maru Calva to understand what had happened to Aeromoto after learning that the project, as I knew it, had come to an end.

In 2014, there was a surge of independent editorials and self-initiated projects in Mexico. However, they lacked a space to share their work. Maru recalls seeing her books, which she had been collecting for years with her partner Mau, gathering dust on the shelves at home.

So they let go of the idea that the books were just theirs—they now belonged to anyone who was interested in them.

Maru tells me that Aeromoto was also born out of a desire to be closer to the people behind independent publishing houses and self-initiated projects.

“We place emphasis on editorial production in Latin America because we‘re interested in connecting with realities similar to ours—that is, colonized, precarious, with a shared language and an overflowing inventiveness and imagination.”¹

“We used to say that Aeromoto was an archive of the present”—a living collection that, beyond holding a selection of books, sought to make space for what was happening at that moment.

Aeromoto stands for a world that challenges private property. It advocates for a slower pace, without hurry—a project that offered space and made time for those who reached out to it. It was a space that welcomed all kinds of publications and books that usually don’t meet the standards of traditional libraries, simply because they don’t fit into typical categorization systems.

Aeromoto advocated for ambiguity, challenging the idea that everything must be named, that words must always make sense, and that ideas must always have a clear reason. At Aeromoto, some books were placed in regular sections, like Performing Arts or Painting, but others fell into imagined categories—such as Damaged by Water, inspired by a book of the same name and as the collection grew, they realized they had many other books that were also damaged by water. Other books were found in the Claveles (carnations) section—not because they were related to flowers, but because in Spanish, clavel can also evoke the verb clavarse which means to dive in, to cling to—books that require time, that require one to get hooked in. Other books were placed in the Revoluciones (Revolutions) section because, at the time and according to those who had cataloged them, they were considered revolutionary. However, revolutions are not fixed; what was once revolutionary can stop being so.

The categories evolved along with the library, they were a witness to those who lived in it and cared for it. When Maru tells me about categorization, she makes emphasis on the relevance of change, of letting things fall into place, she compares it to the way we read books:

“Like when you open a book, get caught up in a story, cry, close the book, it‘s over, and you move on. But then the next thing happens—you open another book, and once again, you get pulled in. The format of the book became the format of the space.”²

Aeromoto mainly survived on grants and funding, and like many cultural projects in Mexico, it constantly required new and inventive ways to keep it going. At the time, projects eligible for this type of funding had to include a public program—initiatives that could, in some way, be tangible. For this reason, they came up with various activities for the library. For example, there were “Curated Tables”—a project that invited people they admired to select books and then donate them to the library as a way to grow the collection. 

In addition to the curated tables, they came up with “Pedagogías Infinitas, a project that invited people who were involved in teaching to choose books they recommended to students, since students were the library’s most frequent visitors. Aeromoto hosted all kinds of different events, from parties, gatherings, performances and workshops to quiet and solitary reading sessions. They even once fought to preserve their small garden in a parking lot. Artists of all kinds visited, along with children, students, and curious neighbors.

Maru remembers that Aeromoto started with a thousand books, and she was excited to know they could do whatever they wanted with those thousand books. As time passed by, the collection grew. By the end of the second year, they had two thousand, then three thousand, then four thousand, and in the end, they ended up with a collection of eight thousand books.

Maru tells me that Aeromoto didn’t have many filters or bureaucratic processes; it aimed to accept the ideas of those who were interested in sharing them.

“Aeromoto is a joint effort or is not. When people no longer come to look for books, when no one comes to want to do an activity, when there’s no one coming to the performance—at that moment, Aeromoto will cease to exist.”³

In a world that increasingly pressures us to pursue our personal interests and look out only for ourselves, I find it exciting to think that there was once a space whose very purpose was to use books as an excuse to share with others. A week ago, I read a passage that stayed with me and made me reflect on how, in the end, creating is not only about ourselves, but about finding connections that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

“…then there’s absolutely nothing I should do about it, or can do, other than try to explain the sense of it as I feel it…That no matter what my taste is and my ideas are, or what my works look like, if I feel it‘s good, there's going to be somebody who will pick up on it”⁴

Despite the chaos that we live in, or perhaps, because of it, these kinds of projects matter. In the end is not the thing itself, but what follows, what stays with others. 

I began this text by saying I wanted to understand what happened to Aeromoto. My concern came from worrying about how projects like this often end in my city—or maybe from my own stubborn desire for things to last. 

‘Like all life in this world is known to be finite and will end. Its effects, however, will remain present in mysterious ways. Perhaps Aeromoto will survive as a whisper, and that rumor will say: things don’t belong to anyone, the transformations of matter don’t belong to anyone, ideas don’t belong to anyone, everything exists to be used by everyone. That which perishes with its use could provoke conflicts, and conflicts can be resolved through words and touch. One must act with affection and care.’⁵

On the weekend, I find myself on the phone with my mother, as has become customary. It always happens on a fixed-ish date at a fixed-ish hour, repeating itself week after week. More than a way to stay in touch, it has somewhat become a time-measuring tool, putting the passing weeks into rhythm. This call was no different. It started out as all of them do, with the question about where we both are and what we're doing at that particular moment. My answer was no different from other times. I was calling her from the studio (more precisely from the balcony of the studio in EKA, which has become an office for taking care of personal business). There was no reaction to my reply coming through the speakers, as my answer has become a template, much like when she used to ask me how school was, and I would reply... “fine.” After this, we move on to other topics. But this time, I found myself putting more thought into this brief moment. Not because it was special, but because it was the same as all the countless calls before, repeating itself, camouflaged in different phrasings for the better part of the last six years. The more thought I put into it, the more I began to suspect the long lifespan of this answer. This was partly because my answer had nothing to compare itself to. My social interactions are all tied to people working in the same field as I am. Even the dogs I meet belong to other graphic designers or people whose work orbits around graphic design. Realizing this, I wanted to juxtapose my work with a series of “normal” professions. The following conversations took place between me and a psychologist, an auto mechanic, a sports coach, and a government worker.

Ana has a private practice; she is a psychologist. Her workday starts at 12 p.m. and finishes at 4 p.m. She works out of her own space, rented close to where she lives. Being in an easily accessible location for her clients is not of the greatest importance to her. Her work involves dealing with people. Although there are similarities between them, she has to approach each case differently. No shocking revelation yet. What strikes me the most is how contrasting she is during the day. During the first part of her day, she is fully invested in the issues of others. However, when that time slot ends, she completely severs that investment and goes on with her own rhythm. When I questioned her on how she does it, she explained that it’s a necessity; doing otherwise would be clouding and unprofessional. She compartmentalizes her tasks, not allowing them to be contaminated by one another. She also doesn't elongate them without purpose. Psychology is perceived as a “serious profession.”

Matic is an auto mechanic. He works at a small company with 5 employees. His work revolves around being dealt a problem that he then has to resolve with the tools and knowledge at hand. His workday starts at 7 a.m. and finishes at 5 p.m. He doesn't work alone; he has a structure supporting him—one that dictates when he is supposed to work, until when, and what he has to produce by certain hours/dates. He makes much less than Ana, but his decisions are much simpler and have precedents. He doesn't deal with as many unpredictable tasks as Ana. He does, however, deal with material possessions that are of great importance to their respective owners. What is an immense problem for his clients is for him a small one. To get him to rush, work overtime, or start something unannounced would be very costly. Sometimes, I feel that I do the opposite—turning small problems into massive ones for myself. Is being an auto mechanic perceived as a “serious profession”?

Tim is a sports coach. He runs his own downhill mountain biking school at a ski hill, 15 minutes from where he lives. He is self-employed. He doesn’t have a fixed working schedule. For him, it’s either very long workdays during the mountain biking season or long off periods during the winter when there is snow on the track. He doesn't really have a structure that assigns him how much time and on what to spend his time. Juxtaposed with Ana, his work-life contrast isn't as sharp. The motions he goes through to make a living are the same ones he would do in his private time. He is in a grey zone. Coaching a team for him means being personally invested. The results of the team are, in part, also a reflection of how well he did his job. Through conversation, I find many similarities between the two of us. A mountain biking school isn't perceived as a “serious profession.”

Suzana is a government official. She is employed by the state and is tasked with running the public procurement process for the state's infrastructure. She starts work at 8 a.m. and finishes at 4 p.m. Outside of this, she has the least free will over her own work time. If a mistake were to happen, its repercussions would be the opposite of unnoticeable. She probably also makes the most of the four, but her success relies heavily on the work done by others. Because of this, she has to take on tasks that fall outside the scope of her job description if she wants to be successful. She doesn’t take her work home with her. Respectively, she has the most boundaries out of the four. Her profession is perceived as a “serious” one.

Is a relationship where the work and life aspects of one’s life have mutual respect for one another—not encroaching into each other's space, not getting caught red-handed in grey zones where it is hard to differentiate one from the other—an identification of a “serious” profession?

I hoped that by reaching out and juxtaposing my experiences with those of other lines of work, I would come up with a sort of personal self-help manual, providing a structure that could serve as a guide. I did not come out with a clear outcome. On second thought, does there even have to be a clear outcome? Or is reaching out to the world of “normal professions” and having a conversation once in a while enough to spark an inner discussion about one’s own practice?