[…] Yeah, we’re definitely Internet kids. […]

[…] The influences have changed over time and I’m definitely still learning. People all the time expect me to know this artist, or know this person, or know this work. And sometimes I just don’t. And I’m still having to learn those things. […]

[…] There’s this book called Mastery by Robert Greene that I read when I was 20. I don’t know what I would think about it now, but at the time it was so impactful, to realize that mastering something, whether it’s in sport or design or cooking or education, requires the same mindset. And the steps that are needed to get there are the same. So the light bulb moment for me was, life is not about what you’re destined to do or the thing that you’re passionate about. It’s about the thing that you can create discipline around or create a sense of mastery around, and that methodology is applicable to literally anything. […]

[…] Steve Jobs’ autobiography by Walter Isaacson. I’d say that’s one of my favorite books just because I got so much from it and look up to him. Build by Tony Fadell is one of my favorite business books from a founder who makes products. Atomic Habits by James Clear. Elimination of Hurry is one of my favorite books. I’ve read it four times just because every year I get so overwhelmed and overstimulated and anxious that it feels therapeutic for my brain to read that book. And then Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a really good one if you haven’t read it. In a world where we have to make choices really fast, it’s about making the right ones and having the right perspective. […]

[…] I’m a big Donald Judd fan, obviously, being from Texas. He’s taught me a lot about art presentation and philosophy and critique and all kinds of things. […]

[…] Initially, M/M Paris was something of an idol for us—representing a pinnacle of creativity and visual innovation. However, it wasn’t long before we realized their artistic approach didn’t quite align with our own. […]

[…] My initial influences were quite similar, including Fugazi and even some straight edge bands. I grew up surrounded by my father’s collection of comics and magazines. Since the age of four or five, I was immersed in a world of books, comics, and magazines, though I was more captivated by music magazines than fashion ones—I had no interest in Vogue, but publications like iD, The Face, The New Musical Express, and The Melody Maker caught my attention. […]

[…] On the topic of record labels, they were a key reference for me in the punk hardcore scene. Record labels often went beyond just music; they organised concerts, ran stores, and sometimes involved in artistic activities. They were more like labs than mere businesses. Around 2005, when I started my studio, I was inspired by Trevor Jackson—a graphic designer, musician, and the owner of the Output label, known for its incredible graphic design. He was involved in multiple creative fields, which I found very admirable. […]

[…] I was quickly drawn to an English label from Sheffield called Warp and to The Designers Republic, the label’s official design agency that did everything for them: the album covers, the identity. The moment I arrived in London coincided with the departure of Michael Place, one of the studio’s leading designers, who had set up his studio, Build, in London. I had the fortune to meet him and to collaborate with him on two or three projects. […]

[…] I’m going to quote M/M, not for their aesthetic approach because our styles are really different, but because they have succeeded within the big gap that exists between fashion and art… they have a foothold in music too. I think that few artistic directors have managed to remain niche doing things like album covers for Björk, visuals for theatres, national theatres, or the International Contemporary Art Fair, while also doing fashion campaigns for luxury brands. I find that interesting. […]

[…] I had the desire to go back to the golden age of magazines such as Cahiers d’Art in the 1930s, Life Magazine in the 1950s, and certain Vanity Fair investigations in the 1970s, to combine real articles with beautiful images. Creating depth and telling stories was the starting point. I didn’t have clients on my back, so I didn’t have to make compromises. And by laying down this roadmap, I created a monster [laughs]. […]

[…] But when I arrived in London in 2005, I read two books that really helped me in my career, in my development as a designer and artistic director, and also in understanding the studio: How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul and Studio Culture, which are 2 books published by the same publishing house, Unit Edition, founded by two English people; Adrian Shaughnessy, and the creative director of an agency called Spin. It’s very graphic design-oriented, and I think it’s quite old because it was published around 2005 […]

[…] I’m going to do another parallel with music. I have always been super inspired by a band called Fugazi for the state of mind that they created. They are the inventors, somewhat reluctantly, of what has been called “Do it yourself” and of the Straight Edge movement, which was a hardcore, anti-alcohol, anti-drug movement, etc. What I find fascinating about their approach is that they have never made concessions and that they have always been irreproachable in their way of doing business, which has aligned with their artistic approach. […]

[…] Josep Quetglas, like all my teachers in Barcelona, was very inspiring. He has written a lot of books. He doesn’t like to travel, but he knows the work of Niemeyer and Le Corbusier perfectly. And he gave these amazing classes where we would redraw different modern houses with an active gaze, like a detective. […]

[…] There was also Guillem Català, for example, my other teacher, whose class was called Anatomy of the Enigma and he recited Dada Poetry in a Bar… […]

[…] I’ve always been very moved by Tadao Ando. I was obsessed with that notion of how to treat emptiness. That guy comes in and says that architecture is also space. And that space, it isn’t empty. In fact, it’s the projection of your brain. All your ideas need space to be expressed. […]

[…] Le Corbusier, who established very reassuring foundations: you have to do this, this, this, and this, and you’ll be a good architect. And that’s what he did. But behind all that, at the end of the day, he was a totally crazy artist who was capable of creating the unthinkable, the unexpected, the artistic. He took those two worlds and created a great explosion: Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. It’s incredible. […]

[…] Adolf Loos because of the Raumplan… Each room must match what it is used for. And if the exterior ends up being aesthetically monstrous, it’s not a huge problem. […]

[…] My brother and I love entrepreneurs. We love books by entrepreneurs, personal development… I’m a Tony Robbins fan. […]

[…] Tony Robbins, to me, is… He’s more than a mentor. He’s… I have his book. I end up reading it—I don’t even know— once a year, more even. It’s super vast actually. […]

[…] Paolo Sorrentino, the director of La grande bellezza (the Great Beauty). Because I was debating for a long time whether or not to make movies. I was talking about time with Aurore. I find that these films touch on a certain timelessness, and this notion of temporality in my work obsesses me: what trace you want to leave and what message you will give. And I feel like it touches on that notion… […]

[…] the most progressive school at the time was the Design Academy. We were going there to look at what the Dutch designers were doing at the time. Droog Design was in full bloom and at the Design Academy at that time there was Li Edelkoort, it was very interesting for young designers. […]

[…] At that time we were looking at the work of Hella Jongerius, who’s still a very important person and figure for us. Or the work of artists such as Philippe Parreno or other practitioners who were very important to us. Enzo Mari, when he was still alive. We don’t have references anymore (…) Of course, I admire the work of the great designers like Konstantin Grcic or others, but I would say that in the past I could refer to some of the maestros as heroes, kind of. Now, the more we are going ahead, the more we contextualize those people in history […]

[…] But then we have very different references for the different parts of the work we do. I mean, even if he’s an old maestro, Mari is still one of the most important references, again, because of his integrity, and the narrative he brought into the discipline. He was very interested in social issues, and he was trying all the time to solve that in the production process, so for sure, he was a very important reference too, but it’s very difficult to find contemporary references… […]

[…] Who is our reference? I think for certain moments it was definitely Hella Jongerius for the integrity and the work. She has been working consistently and very well with a lot of big companies, such as Vitra. She is also very interested in this more non-commercial approach and making exhibition and curatorial products. […]

[…] Well, Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway is one of the most relevant books of our time. But The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing is another book that we love. An additional one that I think has been very instrumental, especially for our previous work, is Should Trees Have Standing? by Christopher D. Stone. It put the rights of other beings at the centre. […]

[…] I gained a lot of visibility thanks to a collaboration with Sheidlina, a Russian artist. I’ll say too that I didn’t do the collab for that purpose. She came to my place. I met her. She was a girl I admired a lot. That was also a turning point, to have someone so talented and with so much reach who acknowledged my work. […]

[…] The main artists I can think of are Pussykrew. They always manage to be inspiring, because of their ideas and how they manage new technologies and innovations. Everything is strong and consistent. […]

[…] I love Lipovetsky. Every time I read his books, I find them so true and so good, and then I can’t describe the book. I’ve read like 6 or 7 of them. There’s one that’s about beauty that was very good. […]

[…] Later I discovered RuPaul’s Drag Race and thought, wow, there are people who express themselves so well and who have enormous freedom to transform themselves into a bunch of different people. […]

[…] AR
I’m reading a lot about architecture at the moment. We did a couple of projects with Martine Rose last year, which was inspired by so many different architects like Rem Koolhas, Balkrishna Doshi, and also Isamu Noguchi. I’m looking backwards a lot at some of these 20th-century artists at the moment, which is divorced from the current design industry I suppose. […]

[…] AR
We were in Munich recently hanging out with the rest of the team and our designer Anja (Lekavski) played this album by Surly, a Polish musician. The album’s called Trip to Warsaw. I was inspired by that. It’s influenced by a lot of early Dubstep and Rhythm and Sound. Just the way he plays with space and sound is exciting. […]

[…] SE
I always found it quite funny and a bit cheesy when people say their kids are inspiring them. But now I have two kids, and it’s definitely true. You just see the way they act and play. Everything is just open. A piece of music is the same as a beautiful colour. They react to it in the same way. They don’t differentiate. They don’t put things in categories. […]

[…] SE
Back in Munich, when we were walking around town, there was this little Dieter Rams store, the bookshelf from Dieter Rams. He is an icon, an absolute GOAT. He didn’t have the tools we have. It was quite something to say “No, that radio player should have just one knob, and that’s how it should be.” Can you imagine how many fights he must have had to go through to actually get that passed? He didn’t have the same resources available like we do. […]

[…] SE
There’s a really good book I’ve read lately called “Convinced!” by a professor from Munich. His name is Jack Nasher. It’s about negotiation. It was amazing when I first read it. Some parts are cheesy, but it’s a really good idea. Chris Voss also talks about a lot of techniques that magicians use. There’s one technique, for instance, where the big motion hides the smaller motion. It’s called misdirection. There’s also the technique of mirroring a person. If I want to make you comfortable, like with you and me, we’ve got the same haircut, so I’m instantly mirroring you.
These techniques, they help in business. Just don’t try to be too cool for school all the time. […]

[…] AR
Stefan and I have both been more active in doing talks and educational seminars with students, so now we’ve had a bit of practice in that side of things. We’re planning on being a lot more open-source with our process and our workflows and creating a discourse for students, etcetera, and making the process a little more real-time so that it’s more of a resource for students. I suppose Virgil [Abloh] was a massive inspiration in that respect. His way of thinking and his way of pushing culture forward through education was very inspiring. […]

[…] Herbert Bayer didn’t mean anything to me first, but I became fascinated with his work and the Bauhaus where he taught. His practice combined art direction, advertising, sculpture, and architecture in a strange new hybrid. As a high school student, Bayer became a formative model of what an artist or designer can be. […]

[…] ‘Paper architecture’ became an important reference. I was exposed to architects — some new, and others that I had studied — like Superstudio, Archigram, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, who were all working on immaterial and hypothetical projects that took the form of books rather than buildings. The ‘little magazines’ from this period showed me how graphic design could play an essential role in cultural discourse. […]

[…] The documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds about Sha’Carri Richardson by the filmmaker Bafic is a great example. It’s a stunning artistic work, but it’s also great for Nike. In architecture it’s the amazing spaces designed by Niklas Bildstein Zaar for Balenciaga. In fashion it’s Benji B.’s musical direction of Louis Vuitton and the amazing shows that have included Tyler the Creator and Kendrick Lamar. […]

[…] I recently read Diaghilev: A Life, a biography of Serge Diaghilev, founder of Ballets Russes. He was an impresario, a catalyst, a junction maker. […]

[…] On the topic of strategy and behaviour, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, describes cognitive biases and explains how our gut reactions often override our rational decisions. One example that’s relevant to design is the “framing effect”: how people can respond differently to the same thing depending on how it’s presented.
And lastly, I can recommend Venkatesh Rao’s oddball book Tempo and blog Ribbonfarm. Essentially, it’s a book about storytelling and decision-making. You should google “Double Freytag Triangle.” […]

[…] I realized that I couldn’t become a designer in a Japanese design school. I felt the country was lacking something in terms of ergonomic and commercial design, so I decided to travel to Scandinavia that winter. For some reason, I was fascinated by the architecture and design of Aalto and Asplund (…) I realized that Aalto wasn’t designed for commercial purposes, but for creating a richer everyday life, and I wanted to be that way too. […]

[…] I was particularly attracted to Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Donald Judd. I have been influenced by contemporary art since I was in college. […]

[…] I was more attracted to the process and way of thinking in contemporary art than the finished works of architecture and interior design, and usually found myself leaning toward conceptual direction. While attending school I did solo exhibitions of art and, even after graduating, I worked on design while studying under critics of contemporary art and architecture. […]

[…] A Japanese translation of the book Donald Judd: Architecture. It was very helpful to know his thoughts about the relationship between architecture and art. And the book on Ingegerd Råman’s work. […]

[…] I love going to the library and finding old references (…) You access things directly. I scan everything…I bring my own scanner ! […]

[…] The Whole Earth Catalog. It’s a magazine from the 1970s that lists all the books of craftsmanship and a whole lot of other things. […]

[…] I used to look up to those architects and designers, such as Shiro Kuramata, Alberto Campo Baeza and Peter Zumthor, but now, rather than considering architectures or designers, I am more interested in, and actually look up to those interdisciplinary artists, such as Daniel Arsham, Tom Sachs; I’d say I look more at the multi-dimensional works themselves, and furthermore, I value their thoughts and philosophy behind the visual. […]

[…] JB
I was lucky to intern with Norm, a hardcore artistic graphic design practice with lots of attitude, lots of humor, and really strong family vibes. […]

[…] JB
I love the biography of James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. His story is about engineering, tool-making, being an outsider within an established industry, about starting your own company and structuring that. All the way down to finding the right location to produce, sourcing material, involve people. It’s an incredibly tensed story. […]

[…] JB
I just read the Gucci Mane book, very entertaining, lots of wisdom. Reading as a general activity is a winner. Magazines, books, online news, forums, anything. […]

[…] One of my first editorials was with Novembre magazine, and there was clear visual communication, visual style; I was amazed by this. […]

[…] I grew up being influenced by architects such as Zaha Hadid or fashion designers like Iris Van Herpen, so I’ve always been attracted to those organic, beautiful shapes. That’s how it worked. […]

[…] For instance, I love Elsa Peretti; she was such a role model as a female designer. Right now, I also look very often at environmental activists. […]

[…] M/M, Antoine + Manuel, Bernard Baissait, Catherine Zask, Anette Lenz, and Christophe Jacquet in the big silkscreen poster period. […]

[…] As for my earliest references, they’re all music‑related images. Peter Saville, Neville Brody, Designers Republic in particular (…) In terms of influences there are also all those 1970s and 1980s Japanese designers who gravitated around Issey Miyake: Tadanori Yokoo who made many posters and magazine covers, Nagai Kazumasa, and Mitsuo Katsui, whose use of shading is amazing (…) Other major influences include Memphis and Alchimia, and Italian postmodernism in general. Mainly Alessandro Mendini. […]

[…] As for graphics and typography, I have a deep fascination for Emigre Fonts and in the same vein, Jonathan Barnbrook, but also for Dutch, German, and Russian design, for Studio Dumbar, Cyan, and Ostengruppe… […]

[…] I’ve also been influenced by a host of fashion designers including Bernhard Willhelm, Walter Van Beirendonck, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, and Manish Arora. […]

[…] M/M for example, continue to do what they’ve always done, yet it’s always new. The way they managed to remain true to their creative selves while running a successful business is impressive. Base Design is another example, impressive in all respects (…) Same for Studio Dumbar, amazing in terms of longevity and unerring quality. Mirko Borsche is a great inspiration too. I love the way he never deviates from the mad angle that permeates all his work. […]

[…] For each project I went to the same books. One, that I bought straight out of art school, is The Ten Influential Creators for Magazine Design by Yasushi Fujimoto. It was my Bible for a while. It wasn’t just the magazine aspect of it that I liked. There were also many strange creations and images. Tadanori Yokoo is in there, for example. There is another Japanese designer in there, outrageous and techno, who influenced me for years: Gento Matsumoto. […]

[…] Alchimia by Kazuko Sato. That had a huge influence on me. There was a kind of esoteric and mystical side of postmodernism that I found later in Memphis. Another book too, a big book in a small format, like a dictionary, was Eighties Japanese Ads. It was full of 1980s Japanese ads, as is suggested by the title, it was awesome. […]

[…] I really am inspired by painting, probably more than I’m inspired by photography, just because this was my initial inspiration. My mother took a lot of time showing me art books, bringing me to all the museums, showing me modern art and classical art. So, it’s not as if it was a snobby decision from my side to be more inspired by paintings rather than photography. It is just what I really loved as a child and it kind of never changed. […]

[…] I really enjoyed Degas and Renoir and Gauguin, but there were also some Russian artists that were very inspiring, like Petrov‑Vodkine, or Vrubel: they all had very different techniques, but there were always elements that sounded true when I saw the pictures: the free, wild, and savage use of colours where colour is not supposed to be. […]

[…] There is a book that is really significant to a lot of Russians. It’s written by a writer whose name is Mikhaïl Bulgakov and the book’s name is The Master and Margarita. It’s almost like a literary Bible in a certain layer of Russian society. (…) I think I read it for the first time when I was 13 or 14, we just moved to Germany and it was a shitty time. It did help me. (…) Whenever I feel a certain void, I go back to this book, because it really covers all the topics like life, death, love, God and the devil – who is also a big part of my personal creation. All those things: cats, Moscow (laugh) […]

[…] DL
One thing that was a huge inspiration for me when I was studying was this club called the Roxy. This place was legendary, it changed its interior every six weeks, pioneered different styles of music, and experimented a lot with different performances – some were nasty and really weird, others were mesmerizing. […]

[…] DL
A lot of digital artists, like Geoffrey Lillemon, Joshua Davis, Carsten Schmidt, Universal Everything were experimenting with art, motion graphics, code. I went to a few of these new media festivals, saw really interesting work and wanted to become part of this new movement. […]

[…] MM
We are not blocked by any references at the beginning and they have always been very broad: from sculpture to graphic design, to Gaugin, to architects… […]

[…] DL
There’s one book that a friend of mine gave me on my birthday and it’s called One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and it’s about a protagonist who understands that everyone looks at him in a different way and he becomes aware of the fluidity of identity. I read this book 10 years ago and it kicked off my spiritual journey (…) It’s by an Italian writer, Pirandello. […]

[…] RM
The thing that we have is from Bristol: a very special place, a convergent city, you know. It’s a convergence of art, music, culture, mystics, storytelling… […]

[…] RM
Grid Systems by Müller-Brockmann […]

[…] RM
key names like Joseph Kosuth, key curators from that era like Pontus Hultén – who worked at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, the Pompidou for a while, and the MOMA – and he has specifically been a very big influence. […]

[…] RM
Sol LeWitt’s text Sentences on Conceptual Art is very important because it really depicts his manifesto and his reasons for working in that way […]

[…] RM
Pontus Hultén (…) Not only because of the artists he was working with, but also because of the way he “art directed art”. That can also be seen in the practice of Harald Szeemann, especially seen in his work for documenta 5. […]

[…] RM
Designing Programs and Grid Systems from the noble Swiss modernists who created a series of very precise strategies about the craft of handling complex information are really useful when it comes to understanding the strategy of consistent and efficient form. […]

[…] OK
I always say that What is a Designer by Norman Potter is a good one. Bruno Munari’s Design as Art. These are simple, humble works. […]

[…] OK
The Real Review – you must read that, its a gem of a periodical. […]

[…] JF
Good strategy/Bad strategy […]

[…] JF
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Shoe Dog by Philip Knight, and I mean personally for me, Sam Harris’ Waking up was a great book. […]

[…] JE
John Maeda’s book on Redesigning leadership. And one book which is fiction is Addlands which is a book about the Welsh countryside and how it evolved. A nice bit of escapism. […]

[…] JF
Just study the career of Aphex Twin and you will learn a lot about the meaning of creativity. […]

[…] A
Pierre Soulages for example thanks to whom I got into painting and who got me into Fine Arts. I especially admire his longevity; Pierre Soulages, who will be turning 102 this year, can keep on painting, it’s obviously so intimate and sincere after all this time that you can’t help but pay attention […]

[…] A
I could name a whole bunch of people: Jane Goodall who studied primates in Africa, the German painter Gerhard Richter who is literally, absolutely incredible. […]

[…] A
On a much more personal level, I can’t help but name a studio that brought all of this about: Ill-Studio; they’re not that much older and yet they blazed a trail for us with their cross‑disciplinary approach and the numerous self‑initiated projects that define their artistic discourse. […]

[…] I remember asking Philip Johnson what was special about Mies van der Rohe – who I think is absolutely the number one architect in history. […]

[…] I was introduced to Richard Hamilton and Bryan Ferry, who worked at Newcastle Art School. They could see I was drawn to the work of design and said: “If you’re interested in all this, have you seen Domus magazine?” I hadn’t. (…) They gave me this magazine and the first thing I saw in it was Kuramata’s work. I thought: “Oh, my God, there is somebody out there kind of visualising what I’ve been thinking”. It was absolutely what I loved and I’d never come across any other living architects before that made me feel that way. […]

[…] GH
Net Art was something I looked at every day. Every single day, Net Art, Tumblr, the new artists. This was via Facebook; it wasn’t easy to communicate. […]

[…] MD
And then there are the famous figures: we have books by Antoine+Manuel, M/M, The Designers Republic, touchstones all. Things we used to look at when we were finishing school and that we still like to look at. […]

[…] A person who really inspired us was Rafael Rozendaal whom we even met in Los Angeles along with many other artists. […]

[…] There is one book that struck me: What I talk about When I Talk About Running by Murakami. And yet I’m not into sports, but the mental toughness, the rigour applied each day impressed me. […]

[…] Skateboard and music were kind of my gateway drug. […]

[…] I love the Germs! Actually, their strategy was they made T‐shirts before they made any songs.
They had T‐shirts before they even played a show or had a song which is kind of interesting,
much. […]

[…] I think all books you find some inspiration from. Patrick Frey the Swiss publisher makes such beautiful books. I’m thinking about those 1960s and 1970s experimental publishers
that were publishing literature like the French book club (le Club français du livre) with Pierre Faucheux. A lot of the books of Dita the artist. Making books was part of his practice, Ed Ruscha’s books, Lawrence Weiner whose work is primary typographic but as an artist he made loads of books and posters, those are a huge inspiration. Typographica the magazine, Emigre the magazine was the biggest inspiration once I got to design school. Also, the skateboard magazine Big Brother, I love. Slash magazine which I did a book on and sort of first‐wave punk magazines. […]

[…] I was convinced then and still am that graphic design and craftsmanship reached a peak in terms of quality and rigour in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in Switzerland and the United States (I’m thinking of Müller‑Brockmann, Max Bill, that whole tradition, and the use of a limited number of typographical solutions, etc.) […]

[…] I love what George Lois said: “The more you treat the masses as intelligent adults, the more discerning and demanding they become”. […]

[…] Mathieu Lehanneur summed it up for me when he said he wanted to be an author rather than a service provider. […]

[…] Primo Levi’s Other People’s Trades. It’s a collection of essays mainly about engineers doing their jobs (…) It reads like fiction as he tells the adventures and misadventures of people working, the problems engineers face and how they solve them. It’s fascinating and I think all professions have the potential to generate as much passion as mine. […]

[…] I love Herzog & de Meuron, who manage to accomplish something that I don’t like too much in my profession: the graphic gesture. […]

[…] At that time London was like one of the places to study graphic design because of Neville Brody, a lot of other people, magazines like i-D, The Face, you know, all these things were happening. It was the beginning of the 1990s, the beginning of the whole rave culture, club culture, a lot of flyers, Ministry of Sound, the Wag, all these clubs. That’s the only reason I went there to study. […]

[…] Jost Hochuli, Detail in Typography. […]

[…] An artist or a person whose work has helped you in terms of development?
Pierre Mendell. […]

[…] One of my design heroes is Tibor Kalman, I think he is an unbelievable man. I used to collect all of the Colors magazines from Benetton. […]

[…] In “professional” terms, there are several “historic” influences, including for example Ladislas Mandel. He was one of the first type designers to work independently after a long career in industrial type design. He was of the same generation as Adrian Frutiger, another type designer who turned his back on the use of his work by an industry rooted in metallurgy. […]

[…] As for art, I’m mainly interested in American sixties conceptual art, Donald Judd for example, and light artist James Turrell, the master of us all. I like to cite Turrell as “by far the best type designer out there”. […]

[…] Pierre-Simon Fournier. And some contemporaries, who are influences, friends, and models: Christian Schwartz, and Kris Sowersby. […]

[…] How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy is one of the only ones I read all the way through, about fifteen years ago. It was educational; not foundational but educational. […]

[…] Sapiens. […]

[…] Olafur Eliasson. And Caravaggio, who was something of a businessman himself. […]

[…] I love people who have weird practices. I like super contemporary people and then… I love
going to the museum in Amsterdam and looking at the still lives. The super saturated images
and the colours are so incredible. I love super modern photography. I feel dropping names of
artists is almost like having a blog. […]

[…] I think that Beuys was cool as fuck, like performing and objects. Just really all over the place. I
like people… Like Louise Bourgeois. There are so many people who are incredible! The vision
of Donald Judd. […]

[…] Margiela, yes, because it’s a conceptual brand. She’s kind of unique in fashion since brands are mainly focused on producing pretty things. I like it when a little more thought goes into it. […]

[…] In truth, I get my inspiration from artists who “divert” or “transform” things – such as Erwin Wurm. I love everything he does; his One Minute Sculptures are a great source of inspiration. Fashion itself inspires me less. […]

[…] I love Dada, the surrealists, and I must say I’m not averse to pop art, it’s totally innovative and again, uses transformation as a tool. I also love conceptual art in general, Marcel Broodthaers for example; his aesthetic is incredible. […]

[…] In terms of business, my dream model is COMME des GARÇONS. I love that brand. They don’t do a lot of accessories, but they still have beautiful leather goods and they also invested in young brands, especially through their concept‑stores. […]