Alphabet

The ABCs of studio practice: the ideas, principles, themes, and names that underpin individual projects and the work as a whole.

Abstraction

The abstract feels more open to us, less prescriptive. In what remains unresolved, non-obvious, and non-figurative, there’s room for intellectual engagement and interpretation — for the viewer to become a co-author of what they’re seeing. As Duchamp put it, the artist performs only one part of the creative act; the rest happens in the viewer’s mind.

Analogueness

As design grows more standardised and digital (we’ve watched, first-hand, the shift from a basic identity kit of business cards and print collateral to one built around social media formats and landing pages), a designer’s work increasingly comes down to moving pixels across a screen, while AI tools generate any image without requiring any skill at all. Staying analogue, staying hands-on, feels to us like a way of staying in contact with reality, even when the analogue shows up in the process rather than the final result. This isn’t only about hand-drawn illustration, our fascination with paper, or analogue type experiments; it extends to something central to how we find ideas: through the physical, the tangible (see ), through objects pulled from the real world.No matter how much we love juggling pixels on screens, living in such a digitalised world has only made us appreciate offline and physical experiences even more, closely tied to our interest in architecture, object design, and fashion design — fields that offer so many layers of contact: spatial, temporal, tactile, and material.

Anticorporativeness

We rarely work with corporate clients. Not all corporations are alike, and exceptions, of course, exist. But most of them require mass, standardised, averaged-out design for broad audiences who likely care little about the visual side of the services they use every day. Design in these situations is about serviceability and ease of scaling, not about showing something new (see ) or finding conceptual or emotional depth. Corporate environments tend to be soulless and automated. We’re sure other studios will happily take on such projects; we approach them with skepticism.

Appropriateness

Design is difficult to evaluate. It’s a deeply subjective discipline in which there are no right or wrong solutions (or rather, we believe there are infinitely many right ones). One criterion, if not the only one, for judging a decision (both internally and externally) is its appropriateness: to context, to audience, to environment.One of a designer’s core skills, in our view, is the ability to assess appropriateness, separating the subjective from the fitting. This connects directly to one of the guiding principles of our studio practice: choosing project-oriented over client-oriented work (see ).

Artificial Intelligence

Contrary to the popular fear that AI will take designers’ jobs, this doesn’t trouble us much. The ethics and working models of AI and of working with it still need to settle, but we mostly see it as a tool for simplifying routine tasks and for advanced research, which is how we use it. Prioritising authorial vision and human presence, we don’t think AI will be able to replace that anytime soon. It will replace client-oriented designers, yes — but we see that threat less as a danger and more as motivation, aimed at designers who already treat themselves as automated task-executors rather than carriers of expertise.

Baldessari, John

Baldessari taught us to be funny, ironic, and playful. His deadpan pairing of image and text, his puns, his refusal to take the art object too seriously: these are close cousins of our own sense of humor. What we take from him most is the confidence that intellectual rigor and a joke aren’t opposites — a good pun can carry as much conceptual weight as a manifesto, and often lands harder.

Benefits

Naturally, the studio works toward benefit. Every project gets evaluated through this lens — but from the beginning, we knew benefit doesn’t have to be financial. It can as well be emotional (working with people who are genuinely invested in what they do), intellectual (entering a new market that expands our experience), or social (when a project shifts the visual and cultural landscape of a city, or meaningfully changes an industry). This lets us stay flexible across projects of wildly different scales — guided first by our own interest, our belief in the project, and our trust in the people behind it, rather than by financial metrics alone.

Benjamin, Walter

Beyond his thinking on collecting (see ), what stays with us is Benjamin’s method in the Arcades Project: building an argument out of fragments, quotations, and observations rather than a straight line of reasoning, trusting that meaning would emerge from the arrangement itself. His flâneur, wandering the city with no destination, noticing what everyone else walks past, is close to how we think about everydayness — attention as a discipline, not a talent.

Broken Minimalism

A term we owe to a negative comment about our work online — one we immediately liked. It captures something essential about what interests us visually: maximum effect through minimum means, and within that clean, precise system, something that introduces an irrational, living element. Everything correct, ordered, aligned to the grid, nothing superfluous — and then, somewhere completely unexpected, there’s some disruption. Something that breaks the rhythm and introduces an element of chaos, irrationality, humor, or play into an otherwise perfect system. Something that teases the eye, or tickles the mind. If Non-Objective’s design were music, we’d want it to sound like Theo Parrish’s early work, something like First Floor.

Co-authorship

Working in co-authorship is a founding principle of how we approach commissioned projects. We are firmly opposed to hierarchical, vertical client—contractor relationships: projects, for us, are collaborations and dialogues built on mutual trust, respect for each other’s expertise, and shared investment. Consistently asserting our boundaries and our right to be true co-authors is our contribution to the kind of design industry we want to see (see ).

Collecting

Collecting is a habitual ritual for everyone on the team. Liza collects what she calls transparent typography: the ghost marks signage leaves behind — peeled-off letters, sun-bleached outlines, the shadow of a sign that’s no longer there. Artem collects abstract drawings, doodled during Zoom calls. Katya photographs everyday and urban details that echo, unexpectedly, the work of artists she admires. Different habits, the same instinct — everyone collects something, contributing to our shared conceptual and visual vocabulary.

Collections

Walter Benjamin’s thinking on collecting is close to us: the idea that a collection is never just an accumulation of objects. We think of collections as small, self-contained systems, where what matters isn’t so much the individual objects as the relationships and interactions between them. Working with collections plays a significant role not only in our research practice but in commissioned work too. Sometimes we draw on archives assembled by others, like the Finnish nature photography we sourced from museum archives for the Boreal project, and sometimes on collections we build ourselves (see ). Either way, working with collections lets us add another layer to a project, beyond whatever we can create by hand alone.

Colour

We have a somewhat complicated relationship with colour. It’s one of the strongest tools in design, understood by everyone regardless of their visual literacy. It can provoke truly strong feelings in almost anyone. And yet its importance, we think, has become overstated. Colour matters, of course, but the discourse around it has grown banal: “bright is good, dark is bad, loud is somehow good, low-contrast is always bad.” What interests us instead is a more refined, carefully tuned palette. That’s why most of our projects work with a fairly contained, not especially wide range of colour, but every one of those colours is chosen with intention, with a reason behind it. At the same time, for us, colour usually plays a supporting, emotional role rather than working as a serious conceptual tool (with rare exceptions, but surely there are some). It remains, after all, the most elusive and the most subjective of all design tools.

Conceptual Art

Art in general is, obviously, a strong source of inspiration for designers. But our practice is focused less on the visual and more on working with ideas, with the conceptual. So it’s only natural that we keep returning, in our own work, to the conceptualists. Seth Siegelaub, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, among others, come up constantly in our conversations and discussions, in both commissioned and self-initiated projects. They remain, for us, the best example of how to approach idea-making: how to prioritise the idea over its execution, and still find a final form for it that’s maximally appropriate.

Conceptuality

Most of the clients who come to us already understand what we do and what our approach is about. When we do need to explain it, we point to how the world has sped up and grown more complex over the past decade or two: ideas and broader solutions simply last longer, and carry more weight, than quick visual trends or isolated design elements. People are getting better at spotting emptiness behind a pretty facade, and they don’t fall for it the way they used to.In an over-saturated world, audiences have become far more critical about what they engage with. You have to reach them through an idea or an emotion, not a catchy logo or a flashy palette. People no longer register separate elements; they process everything at once (identity, communication, product, service, community) as one unified image, even if they couldn’t articulate it that way. That’s what tells them whether something resonates.

Conflict

We don’t think design should avoid friction — good design creates it. Not for its own sake, but because doing something differently, refusing to go with the current, tends to produce resistance as a side effect. The projects that end up moving anything forward — an industry, a practice, a conversation — are usually the ones that provoked a disagreement first.

Contextuality

Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It runs up against an environment, a specific audience, an active world around it: understanding that context is what gives an idea its character, its specificity, its novelty, rather than letting it collapse into something average.We think of context the same way we think about appropriateness (see ): a solution can be technically sound and still be wrong, if it ignores where and for whom it exists. This is part of why we resist references and moodboards as a starting point (see ); a picture pulled from somewhere else carries someone else’s context, not the one in front of us. Real contextuality means research, not resemblance: understanding a city, an industry, a community closely enough that the resulting idea could only have come from that specific set of circumstances, not from a generic brief that could belong to anyone.

Contrasts

Simplification and flatness usually irritate us. What draws us, instead, is tension, and contrast is one of the primary tools for creating it. Not necessarily the typical binary kind — big vs small, or a high-contrast palette. Contrast, as we see it, can be intellectual or contextual just as much as visual. It’s about working with attention, sometimes working against expectation — but never through cheap, banal means. Paradoxically, in a world full of loud, bright, saturated design, a low-contrast or near-monochrome identity can end up far more visible than something fighting for brightness and attention through familiar, worn-out tools.In that sense, the low-contrast fascinates us just as much. It doesn’t fight for the viewer’s attention, but leaves room for a choice, for real interest, rather than a reflexive reaction to something fast, loud, and big.

Curating

Increasingly, the designer’s role today looks a lot like a curator’s. We’ve always argued that a designer is defined not by their technical skills but by their vision. As AI and similar tools take over more and more of the technical work, and the entry threshold into the profession keeps dropping, what becomes most valuable is exactly this: the ability to see and set direction. Not only within design, but at any level, really.We find ourselves, more and more, operating as curators on most of our projects — where our task is to understand, take responsibility for, and design how everything works together across the different parts and layers of a project. Brands today are only getting more complex, and design can no longer exist in isolation from product, communications, service, community, etc. Designers, in that sense, are becoming the ones who find and build the connections between all of it.

Curiosity

We see curiosity as one of the primary driving forces. Both for the studio’s practice and for everyone on the team. In commissioned work, it shows up through the sheer range of fields we work across. Every project becomes a chance to explore how a different world is built: how the art market works in France, what matters in an educational institution, or what happens behind the closed doors of a Michelin-starred kitchen. We have asked more embarrassingly basic questions in client meetings than we’d like to admit. Every one of them earned its keep.Curiosity also pushes us to ask how something familiar might be done differently — how a habitual format, an identity, say, might be reinterpreted into something else entirely. How a default solution might be replaced by something that brings novelty, something that departs from how things are typically done.Beyond client work, curiosity is what drives our own projects and research. It stems from our belief that design isn’t only an applied tool, but a tool for exploration. That’s exactly where each of our self-initiated projects begin.

Design as

One of our favourite frameworks is exploring the modalities of design: what it can and can’t do, what it already is, and what it can become. The flexibility of design as a discipline is what interests us most: its capacity to constantly reinvent itself, to be interpreted differently every time. Design is, of course, more than picture-making. It’s also a tool for research, a way of telling stories, a way of engaging with the world, a way of stumbling into contexts we never expected to find. Both a commercial and artistic practice. And, naturally, a way of trying on entirely different roles. We keep returning to the same question: what else could it be? Which design as have we not yet explored and what might they turn out to be?

Design as Artistic Language

It has always seemed unfair to us that we can easily imagine an exhibition built around painting, sculpture, photography, video, or design objects — but struggle to picture a graphic design exhibition that doesn’t slide into applied, commercial territory. For all our love of books, posters, and packaging, an exhibition of that work is, more often than not, still an exhibition of commissioned client work. The question we keep asking ourselves: how can graphic design itself become the medium for artistic work? How does it become an artistic language in its own right? Design does not have to justify itself through utility alone. We want to challenge that default assumption (through our own exhibitions) and show that design can work as a tool for telling artistic stories, and for making art.One example is our exhibition Clockwise and Otherwise, a visual research project about time and its measurement, where we brought together 145 clock faces. Its subject is time itself: its instability, the subjectivity of how it’s perceived. And its medium is, quite literally, graphic design: not design applied to an idea, but design as the idea’s vessel.

Design as Role-Play

We like to think of design as trying on roles. The designer isn’t only an image-maker: they’re an interviewer, a researcher, a psychologist, a scriptwriter, a curator (see , ), etc. The ability to inhabit different perspectives and speak from different positions is, we think, inseparable from the idea that design is not reducible to picture-making. Through our studio practice, we want to demonstrate (and, of course, experience ourselves) what it means to design in a much broader sense.

Design as Thinking

The designer is not hands; they’re a head. To design is not to draw; to design is to invent, to create, to develop.

Design Not as a Service

Design is still widely perceived as a service, one where the designer plays the role of hands, and the client feels entitled to override conceptual decisions, assuming the designer will simply set their own judgment aside. “The client knows best.” This is an unequal dynamic, and despite all the talk of partnership, it remains common.And we believe in building genuinely equal relationships (see ) with every client and project. Each side brings its own expertise, and each should operate within it. Designers need to reclaim their agency: to fight for the solutions they propose, not out of stubbornness, but by explaining, articulating, and drawing the client into their way of thinking.This requires designers to understand why they make the decisions they make, and to be able to communicate them clearly. That discipline is good for designers themselves. And it is good for the industry: the more designers assert their reasoning, the more clients learn to treat them as partners rather than executors of preferences.

Designers’ Agency

For too long, design has been treated as service work: something you commission, not something you author. We want to see that shift: designers reclaiming self-respect, and earning it back from clients too. Not agency as a demand for control, but a return to what design can actually do, a practice capable of shaping things for the better, not just executing someone else’s brief.

Dialogue

Every commissioned project is a meeting of two or more parties, each with their own expertise. We know how to create and design things; our client knows how contemporary museums work, or how a restaurant operates from the inside. When these expertises meet in a project, something is generated that neither side could have produced alone.We try to keep this dialogue as transparent as possible. Many clients come to us without prior experience of working with designers — and part of our role is to make our process and approach legible, leaving no room for ambiguity. In doing so, we also educate: we share what we do and how we think, while learning, in return, how their world is structured (see ).

Ethical Alignment

Ethical alignment is also a primary criterion in how we choose projects. Our starting point is always whether there’s no ethical contradiction with what a client does, what their project is, and who they are as people — and whether that holds true for everyone on the team, too. Everything begins there.

Ethics

In a world that constantly debates what ethical work and working processes look like, we try to ensure that our own internal process is honest and fair to everyone involved. The pursuit of ethical practice is always a path rather than a destination, and we are far from perfect, but we strive, first and foremost, to make the studio a place where everyone on the team feels comfortable, and where the structure of the work accounts for the needs of all its participants.We also try to bring an ethical approach into the world through small, concrete gestures: transparent project credits, honest acknowledgment of every contribution however minor, and advocating for respectful communication between clients, producers, and designers. Every interaction with a client is a precedent — an opportunity to leave them better prepared for working with designers in the future, more attuned to things that seem obvious to us but may not have been obvious to them.

Everydayness

The everyday is one of our primary sources of ideas. We are drawn to the real world, to recurring patterns, to the small artifacts of ordinary life — and to the question of how these images and observations might be carried into a project, literally or as metaphor. There is already so much around us; sometimes it simply requires stopping and noticing. This also means resisting the pull of the purely professional: not only looking at what other designers and authors have already made (see ), but turning toward the world itself.

Extensions

We’ve always seen design as something much wider — not just a commercial or practical discipline, but a tool for inquiry, discovery, and telling stories that matter to us. For us, design is about ideation and creating, and that can mean anything from making objects and experimental publications (like we do with Apropos Editions) to curating exhibitions, from exploring clothing design in our experimental brand Praxis(abc) to launching Fine Graphics Dept, a studio for abstract illustration, or working on educational and art projects where design becomes the medium. And since we’re pretty obsessed with structures of different kinds, at some point, all our personal and collective experiments and research interests ended up under the umbrella of extensions, which are basically offshoots of our design practice.

Extracurricular

Extracurricular projects and activities (everything we do beyond commercial practice) are an inseparable part of the studio’s work. They function as lenses: ways of observing, researching, and telling stories to different audiences. Some respond to longstanding interests; others emerge from sudden curiosities that a project can quickly satisfy. Together, they cover the full range of what we think design can be: developing objects, curating exhibitions, conceiving projects that take the form of books, shows, or websites — everything that falls outside the boundaries of conventional commercial practice, helping the studio remain not just a business, but a contributor to contemporary culture.

Honesty

We care about keeping our professional conscience clean, which is exactly why we have principles (see ) built around honesty: honesty with ourselves, with clients, with our community, with students.Honesty, for us, is about not performing a position we don’t hold — not pretending enthusiasm for a brief we find empty, not presenting a compromise as a breakthrough. It’s telling a client when something isn’t working, even when silence would be easier. It’s giving credit where it’s due, however minor the contribution (see ). And it’s teaching the same way we work: when students or younger designers ask us something, we’d rather give an honest, complicated answer than a reassuring, simple one. Honesty is slower and occasionally uncomfortable. We think it’s the only thing that actually earns trust.

Hyperlocality

As an international studio with a team spread across different cities, countries, and continents, we’ve come to realise that what interests us most is international hyperlocality. Asking ourselves questions about globalisation — its benefits (?), its costs, its consequences — we have noticed that global projects are often stripped of strong character, making them, in a sense, akin to mass projects (see ).The hyperlocal earns our attention because it gives us the chance to research different cultures, communities, and their particularities, and the depth and weight of the impact this kind of work has on a specific audience. Designing for a large international startup will, in most cases, produce a weaker effect than a well-designed and curated independent bookstore somewhere in Seoul, or a neighbourhood café in Helsinki that people visit every day — even if it’s only the residents of a single district. Or a small local museum in Makhachkala, whose number of visitors is, of course, far smaller than that of any major institution. And yet each of these projects exerts a stronger influence on its audience and its environment: partly because of the contrast, and mostly because of the absence of competing noise around it.

Ideology

A designer without an ideology (or a vision) behind their practice is simply a pair of hands. Some think about influence on culture at large; others look for ways to facilitate communication between people; others pursue an ideal within the context of their craft. Every designer’s ideology is their own, but without a principled position, design practice will never have depth. Without it, design becomes just a job. What fascinates us about design is precisely its capacity to be a way of thinking, and a way of looking at the world around us.

Immediate Curiosities

Irrationality, meanings and contexts, non-objectivity (of course), collections and archives, contrasts and repetition, linguistics and language, everydayness, time, conceptual art, shifting patterns, duality, otherness, semantics, cultural differences and similarities, global vs local, rhythm, abstraction, subtlety, rhymes, unexpected beauty, details, instructions, and synthetic sounds. Some of these are passing fascinations; others have stayed with us since the beginning.

Impact

We always think about contribution to culture, to individuals, to institutions, to environments. Every commission passes through this filter. Design has the ability to alter perception: sometimes at a systemic level, sometimes through small interventions in everyday life. Scale is not the point (see ). The question is always whether something shifts.

Intellectual Expression

To many, our work might not seem visually expressive. We prefer to think of the expression we pursue as intellectual: something that doesn’t rely on obvious tools (bright colour, a large image, trending graphics) but instead addresses the mind of whoever receives it. Something that makes them think, reconsider, pause for a moment to read a hidden layer or decode an embedded idea. In a world of fast content and standardised everything, this is, we believe, what builds more lasting and meaningful relationships with an audience.Those who demand more visual expressiveness in design often seem, without realising it, to hold a low opinion of their own audience — as though people need to be spoken to simply. We disagree. There is no need to take away from an audience their capacity or desire to think. What there is a need for is more occasions that require them to.

Irrationality

Irrationality is synonymous with Non-Objective. Not only as a favourite theme of ours, but as one of our primary tools (or traits?) — a way of preserving the presence of the author, the sense that a human hand touched the work, even within something highly systemic and structured. Sometimes this irrationality comes through analogue, hands-on techniques (see ); sometimes through a break in the system (see ). Sometimes it’s accidents, shifts, textures. Sometimes it’s conceptual irrationality: puns, jokes, deliberate illogic. And sometimes, simply intuitive decisions. All of this is what separates the human-made from the machine-made (or AI-made). A machine can follow patterns; it cannot replicate the unpredictable.Irrational elements make outcomes more interesting and less predictable for the viewer. So when you stumble over an inconsistency, an unexpected detail, a slight wrongness — you stop. You notice (see ). You notice something that tickles your mind. That moment is one of genuine attentiveness — where interest, and attachment, begin to form.

Jelinek, Jan

Jelinek’s (and Farben’s, and Gramm’s, and whatever other name there is) music works in near-imperceptible shifts: loops that shouldn’t be interesting on paper become hypnotic through minute variation, texture standing in for melody. It’s a masterclass in subtlety and in what happens when you trust an audience to notice small differences rather than obvious ones (see ). His corner of electronic music was never built for scale (see ), and that’s exactly why it still sounds specific decades later, while louder, more “important” records from the same years have dated badly.

Judd, Donald

The greatest. It is hard to say what shaped us more: his works, his texts, or his spaces across the US. A giant figure in the studio’s lore.

Language

Language seems like an endless source of ideas. Given our text-centricity (see ), it’s no surprise that we turn to language constantly, whether we’re borrowing from linguistics proper or from something as mundane as punctuation.A comma, a line break, a footnote — these carry meaning the way a typeface or a colour does, just in a register most people don’t consciously register. We’re drawn to wordplay, to double meanings, to the moment a name or a phrase reveals a second reading once you sit with it a little longer. Sometimes an entire identity starts from a single linguistic observation rather than an image. In that sense, language isn’t just something we write with — it’s raw material, the same as paper or an object might be (see ).Lawrence Weiner, one of our idols, knew better than anyone how to work with language.

Languages

For much the same reason we’re captivated by the endless possibility of language, we like to say that we don’t work with design or ideation as such — we develop conceptual and visual languages. Embedded in that is the idea that a language is a complex system of components, capable of endlessly generating new statements, new tones, new interpretations, using a roughly fixed set of units (words, phrases) that can still be assembled into entirely different sentences.What we like about the idea of developing a language is that it isn’t just about creating a fixed set of brand elements — it’s about building a tool that lets the project interact with the world, its audience, and even itself. As Wittgenstein put it, the limits of my language are the limits of my world: the more flexible and considered the language, the easier it is for a brand to build its own universe.So when we talk about the upper-level thinking behind a brand, we usually talk about developing a conceptual language: the ideas and thoughts a brand operates with, in order to build more complex, layered statements. And when we talk about a design system, we mean a visual language — because traditional visual identity assumes a fixed set of identical elements, whereas we think design today lives and evolves the way a language does. Elements shift to the foreground and replace older ones; the system keeps updating itself, keeps rewriting its own rules; and it can be spoken slightly differently by everyone who speaks it, while still remaining, recognisably, the same language.

LeWitt, Sol

LeWitt’s conviction that the idea becomes a machine that makes the art is close to how we think about conceptual and visual languages we develop (see ): once the system is right, someone else can execute it, and it’s still authentically the work. We recognise the same logic in his grids and permutations: rigor and repetition as a way of pushing a structure to its limits rather than decorating it, with the inevitable human errors that creep into even the most rigid system (see ).

Love

Somewhere along the way, design got colonised by business coaches, motivational speakers, and people selling “success” as a lifestyle. We’d rather work with people — on the team, among collaborators — who are here because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else, not because a webinar promised them a shortcut. It’s not a sentimental point; it’s closer to a filter: hard to fake, easy to spot the absence of.

Nawrot, Karl

Nawrot builds typefaces the way we’d like to build identities: starting from a system, then letting it misbehave. His invented alphabets and irrational sign systems treat legibility as optional and logic as something to be gently sabotaged, letters that look hand-drawn even when they’re not (see , ).

New Optics

New optics operates on two levels for us. For the audience, it’s about offering a new way of seeing something ordinary or habitual — a shift in perspective on the everyday. For the studio itself, it’s about reconsidering the defaults of our own discipline and industry, first for ourselves and, in turn, perhaps for the field at large. What else could an identity be, if not predefined, pre-set elements? What if a book isn’t literally a book, but some other artifact that performs all the same functions a book performs?

Non-mass

We are wary of scale for its own sake — of the pursuit of bigness simply because bigness is the assumed goal. Mass appeal is, by definition, the attempt to please everyone. But something built to please everyone, in the end, pleases whom exactly? We believe strongly in the non-mass. Contrary to the industry’s usual chase of scale, we think the niche, the avant-garde, actually leave a deeper mark on the environment and do more to shape what the future looks like than mass projects — which tend to arrive late, catching up to what the non-mass has already done. Mass equals blurred. Mass equals unified. Mass equals standardised. Mass equals default. And in the default, there’s no room left for curiosity or experiment. Novelty rarely comes from the centre. Designer and artist Styopa Lipatov describes this as the difference between drifting and following a route: the drifting maker trusts instinct, moves without a fixed plan, and arrives somewhere a planned route never reaches. A modernist approach, by contrast, works like public transport — it follows a route, and whatever’s new lives outside it.

Non-objectivity

This is the key criterion we test our work against. Is there some irrationality in it? Some reinterpretation of the familiar? A new way of looking, a new optics? Some novelty in the solution — a shift from what’s imposed or conventional? Is there a layer of newness in the work, the kind we’re always reaching for?

Non-referentiality

We principally do not work with references: they box in expectations for both the client and the designer. A client (prioritising their own subjective preferences) may see something in an image that has nothing to do with what a professional designer would notice there. A designer, in turn, can end up hostage to the client’s preconceptions of what design should be, losing sight of the bigger picture, of what the project actually needs. It’s worth remembering that we all look at design differently, and interpret the same images differently: neither a client’s reference set nor a designer’s moodboard guarantees the mutual understanding that only research and dialogue can provide.

Novelty

We try not to reach for the first idea that comes to mind — a taxi app doesn’t have to mean the journey, an HR platform doesn’t have to mean the ladder. Obvious metaphors are obvious for a reason: they’re the fastest route to a concept, which is exactly why they’re rarely worth taking.We also like questioning the given — the way something has always been done, simply because that’s how it’s always been done. Why does an identity have to come as a fixed, ready-made set of parts? Why does a book have to be, literally, a book? Not reinvention for its own sake, but a genuine willingness to ask — and, where it’s appropriate (see ), to actually change the answer. For us as a studio, this is also about reconsidering the defaults of our own discipline and industry — first for ourselves, and, in turn, perhaps for the field at large.

Objectness as Method

We often build ideas by searching for the right object — one whose basic properties (form, proportions, way of interacting, materiality) or symbolism can be borrowed and translated. This is how the website for ausei became structured as a book. Or how, for the Parisian coffee shop Volume, the “graphics” on the menu weren’t printed lines at all — but the creases left by folding the paper itself.

Paper

We have a special relationship with paper. It captivates us for its symbolic properties, and for how those can be reinterpreted into something new. For a chairs exhibition we curated and designed at Koordinata, large sheets of paper placed beneath each object worked less as labels explaining why a piece had been selected, and more as symbolic plinths — elevating an everyday object through paper’s whiteness and fragility, giving it the aura of something exhibited.Paper also interests us for its interactivity. Fold it, and the creases themselves can become the design: this is how we built the menu for the café Volume in Paris. Or take our shoot for the French brand AXEP, where most of the elements were printed flat on ordinary paper, and only the jewellery remained three-dimensional — the only volume in an otherwise flat frame. A study in the tension between the flat and the dimensional, the printed and the actually there.

Post-disciplinarity

We respect practitioners who choose a single niche or narrow specialisation and dedicate their entire practice to it. But we see ourselves differently: our ideas rarely fit within the standard frameworks of graphic design — they tend to show up through objects, spatial solutions, curatorial projects instead. We are totally against limiting ourselves to a single field, which is why we define Non-Objective as a post-disciplinary practice.More broadly, we believe different designs (design disciplines) should be more interwoven with each other. Despite entirely different toolkits, we notice that the conceptual apparatus — as well as the themes, questions, and concerns — of different kinds of designers (graphic, interior, fashion, object, etc.) overlap considerably.

Principles

We’re, quite obviously, a studio built on principles. There’s a set of ethical, aesthetic, and other criteria that guide our work — and it’s essential to us not to violate them. Above all, we never make things we couldn’t later put our name to with a clear conscience (professional and personal both). In such situations, we’ll explain why something doesn’t work; and if the client isn’t ready to hear it, we’ll simply propose parting ways at that stage of the project. To us, having these principles is what having a position, an ideology, actually means. It’s the spine the studio is built around.

Process as Method

Sometimes the idea lies in how the process itself unfolds. Every so often, we take a single starting thought and let the main idea become how we execute or unpack it. The identity for the creative industries festival G8, for example, was built around the idea of multivocality — so the process itself became about every member of the studio designing their own version of the identity within a shared set of visual constants, each bringing their own personal, authorial interest to it (someone focused on typography, someone on graphics, someone on layout, etc.).

Project-Oriented Approach

Our work is always oriented toward the project, not the client. Our priority is for the project to come together — to be appropriate and effective wherever that matters: emotionally, in how it communicates its message, in how it functions. Drawing on our accumulated experience, we can tell the solutions that really serve the project apart from ones that are simply someone’s subjective preference.

Raising the Entry Threshold

In a world where information keeps multiplying and accelerating, where access to it keeps getting easier, a battle for attention begins — and somewhere in that battle, people lose the capacity, and the desire, to go deep: to learn more, to make an intellectual effort. In our projects, we try to leave room for that effort, and we’re always against simplifying or flattening things for the audience. We’d rather have design present a picture of a smarter future than adjust itself to a lowering bar.We see the same thing happening in the design industry itself: the entry threshold keeps dropping, and professional standards keep dropping with it — and it does concern us a lot. We remain fully convinced that design should be a profession open to everyone. But some baseline of professional standard, we think, is necessary for the industry to keep existing at all.

Research

The research is a necessary stage in our process. It helps us immerse ourselves in context, understand how something works — a client’s project, or, in the case of self-initiated work, a theme we want to explore. Research, in this sense, isn’t limited to visual research — if anything, that’s the smallest part of it. Looking at images, references, similar visual solutions is, of course, a normal part of the process, but not the main one for us. We want research to go deeper, and love when sometimes it ends up spinning off into its own separate project, simply because we got too interested in a theme to let it go.

Repetition

Now and then, themes or techniques recur in our work — and this doesn’t worry or bother us. Several of our projects, for instance, return to the idea of a frame and its contents, or duality, or exploring various scales within one project. But we’re never reusing the same visual solutions; we’re circling back to the themes that genuinely interest us. There’s real appeal in it, actually: in how many different ways can you tell and reinterpret the same idea, the same metaphor, the same theme?

Scale of Impact

When we think about the value of a project, we think about its effect on a specific person. How might it make them look at the world slightly differently? Change doesn’t only happen at the level of global brands — local ones are just as capable of it. Projects embedded in everyday life (a coffee shop, a favourite podcast, a basic t-shirt) can make the ordinary nicer, expand someone’s sense of contemporary culture, help them rediscover a city, and quietly introduce a new way of seeing (see ). By shaping the visual environment, we believe we can shape how the world feels.

Selectiveness

We’re grateful to have this privilege, at least now, of choosing who we work with, and who we don’t. We only take on projects that don’t conflict with our principles and position (see ), that truly interest the team, and that carry some potential to leave a positive mark on their audience or environment. What we’re really looking for is alignment: ethical, aesthetic, intellectual. This is, in part, why we rarely chase big names or big budgets: we’d rather work with people who are passionate about what they do, even if the project is modest in scale. Selectiveness, for us, isn’t pickiness for its own sake — it’s what lets us stay honest about the work we take on, and confident enough in it to fully commit. We’ve said no to bigger budgets than we’ve said yes to. Nobody keeps score — but if they did, it’d be a quiet source of pride.

Self-censorship

What we also notice is that even without a demanding client in the room, many designers begin to self-censor by reflex — anticipating objections, imagining the client who will ask for something brighter, bigger, more conventional. This internal phantom client kills the impulse to search for something new. We think it’s important for designers to drop that reflex — to leave room for clients to surprise them, and to be ready, when they don’t, to defend their solutions for as long as those solutions remain appropriate.

Siegelaub, Seth

Siegelaub proved that a work of art doesn’t need an object at all — the Xerox Book and his dematerialised exhibitions treated the catalogue, the contract, the idea itself as the primary artifact, not documentation of something else. We are also deeply inspired by how he moved fluidly between publisher, curator, and dealer, refusing to be pinned to one role (see , ).

Studio as a Cultural Entity

When TBI asked us how we’d like Non-Objective’s approach to influence broader conversations about what design can be and do, our answer was this: we run the studio not so much as a business, but as a brand (or rather, a cultural entity and research office) — one that generates ideas and produces new things, both for clients and through our own projects. We see our role as exploring the today (its conditions, its rhythms, its contradictions), and everything we make becomes a response to that now-ness.Our goals shift depending on who we’re talking to. For designers, it’s about reclaiming agency. For clients, it’s about learning to see designers as co-authors, not functional executors. For a broader audience, it’s about encountering design as a medium capable of carrying stories and ideas that extend far beyond the discipline itself. We know it’s impossible to change an industry this size quickly, or easily. But for as long as we have the chance, we’ll keep taking whatever steps we can — and, hopefully, inspire others to do the same, just by example.

Subtlety

Our visual language tends toward restraint: we avoid the bright, the loud, the ephemeral (by that we mean trendy) — not because we’re withholding, but because expression for its own sake rarely interests us (see , ). What we’re after is closer to intellectual resonance: meaning that reveals itself through context, rather than being announced on arrival. Typography and layout carry a lot of that weight for us — not decoration, but structure doing the work of meaning. We like projects an engaged viewer can actually get lost in (in a good way), with nuances and references that only surface on a second or third look.

Temporality

Time — and the temporal — is one of the themes we keep returning to, consciously or not, throughout the studio’s existence. Maybe it’s because time is one of the most non-objective, irrational things there is: hard to pin down, always shifting, never quite fixed in place — which makes it always worth investigating. We’ve pursued it in self-initiated projects (On the Non-Objective Nature of Time, Clockwise and Otherwise) and folded it into commissioned work too (Sight, Existential Crisis Sundays, Boreal).

Text-centric

Concept development for us usually starts with a search for ideas — and, in the spirit of the conceptualists we admire, those ideas most often take shape as words: a phrase, a sentence, something a little twisted on purpose. It’s a sign of building concepts from an idea rather than an image (see ) — a way of avoiding the usual set of ready-made visual solutions, and reaching, instead, for something new.

Unexpected Beauty

We notice beauty in the non-obvious: tangled wires and cables, parking lot markings, scaffolding, faded signage, painted-over graffiti, wall textures, empty billboards, technical diagrams, distorted glare and reflections, unexpected rhymes, and things that happened by accident. Half our reference folders are these — the kind of thing you only notice once you start looking.