BENCH WALK is a series of publications, designed to the brief "Make things public".

Carrying the pink bench around central London landmarks became a performance, reflecting the inconvenient and ridiculous journey of the bench in public spaces.

BENCH WALK investigates what happens when a domestic object is taken into public contexts, testing the boundaries of what ‘belongs’ in a place. Despite being an ordinary household item, the bench is turned into a tool to examine public spaces in through an alternative perspective.

Our bench was created with the intention of being a temporary intervention in the public. The journey through public transport became a performance about the physical awkwardness of moving an object that signifies rest. We did not want to focus solely on the purpose of the bench, but more on how people react when a bench is found in an uncommon placement.

The interactive elements we created as a group were postcards and a banner. A banner printed with the phrase “RECLAIM YOUR SPACE”, spilling over the bench and onto the ground. Postcards were handed out as well as left on a shelf attached to the bench, which was a direct method of prompting people to engage with our work.

Trailer to promote Movement Conference, an annual animation meetup.

In collaboration with animator Margrethe Fredriksen.

The brief was to create a trailer alongside graphic branding for the conference. There was an underlying theme of using ai methods with traditional animation techniques, so we used human references to see the effect of different styles.

When making the first analogue animation, we used a laser cutter to create cutouts. Which was followed by spraypaint, giving a negative and a positive set of frames. Because it simulated movement by itself, it became the main motif of the trailer.

Our kid (from the North of the South of the M1 River) is an autobiographical film of Louise Owusu-Kwarteng's journey into professorship. This portion of animation was related to her discovery of having grapheme synaesthesia during early education, requiring a full typographic alphabet.

You can read more about this project here.

Initial storyboards were made according to Louise's synaesthesia of each letter. Dual tone riso was originally going to be used, but it was more sustainable to create single prints, using the same piece of paper and running two colours individually.
These were then scanned and compiled into animated typography.

Real-time ascii rendering of a camera stream. Each frame is downscaled, converted to greyscale, and an ASCII character representing the closest brightness is chosen from a preset list.

Custom stamps were made to create unique iconography, using the same materials cut into more recognisable shapes.

BEAT is a charity that provides support for a range of eating disorders. The following work is a speculative design that uses an alternative logo, and subsequent visual style. Originally, the logo presented multiple circles overlapping, showing the togetherness of the community. That concept was core to the process, reinvigorating the brand without losing the original function and tone of voice.

We wanted to retain the togetherness visualised in the previous logo, so we used distinguishable shapes, reinforcing unique voices uniting together. During experimentation with printing methods, we found that stamping could be a kind of fingerprint, reinforcing the personal human touch of empathy and community.

The tactile approach informed the rest of the branding, as the prints became a new visual system. The stamps were a versatile enough system to design specific iconography, maintaining the hand printed imperfections. Soft foam was the best at reliably printing the same texture.