Inspired by the lights and colours of KTV and getai traditions, the design uses bursts of colour and lines, expressing the conflict between participating litigants. Karaoke Court is a work of performance art by artist Jack Tan as part of his solo exhibition, How to do things with rules, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore, from 13 August to 29 September 2015.

Karaoke Court is a work of art and performance inspired by the Arctic Eskimo and Inuit tradition of ‘song duels’. Taking place within festive occasions, litigants present grievances to the entire community for judgment in the form of humorous and satirical songs. Due to the necessities of survival in the Arctic, the aim of the Eskimo or Inuit litigation is to restore relationships and to dissipate the build up of community tension, as much as it is to determine the winner.

M1 Peer Pleasure provided a platform for young people to develop and showcase original theatrical works to communicate their unique perspectives on 2019’s theme of poverty, culminating in creative and open exchanges through drama and dialogue. The festival required a strong identity system to be iterated across various formats while retaining cohesiveness and not be repetitive. Through substantial strategic analysis, the festival collaterals were steered to target the key audience, such as creating festival guides tuned for teachers and institutions, resulting in most programmes being sold out.

Dreamseeds Arts Fest celebrates the creative pursuits and explorations of Club Rainbow (Singapore)’s brightest beneficiaries. This year’s theme of “Finding Futurenova” explores the powers of imagination and follows a group of intrepid explorers as they embark on a space journey and eventually reach Futurenova, the planet of dreams. The design extends from the narrative of the four protagonists and the landscapes of their journey featuring prominently across the festival collaterals. Fluorescent colours and pixellation were also employed to project vibrant dreamscapes that are futuristic, imaginative and engaging. The rendering of the animated characters and an accompanying video game following the storyline were also designed for additional interactivity.

The Oceanic is an exhibition focusing on large-scale human interventions in oceanic ecospheres with contributions by 12 artists, filmmakers, composers, and researchers who engage with both the long cultural histories of Pacific Ocean archipelagos and their current conditions. In keeping with NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore’s various collaterals, the exhibition identity uses the Centre’s house fonts to maintain a consistent look.

Drawing from State of Motion’s thematic premise that zooms in on the perceptions of Singapore through cinema’s gaze, the design uses obscuration and light projections that cuts across the pavilion space and print collaterals that plays with the gesture of ‘looking’. The projection lines also intersect across some instances to form a visualisation of an eye. Echoing the exhibition pavilion by artist Randy Chan, the fencing was referenced to grid the deliverables.

The ADM Grad Show 2016 draws reference from the narrative of an interstellar voyage that was undertaken by the Voyager space probe when it was sent to explore the furthest reaches of our solar system. Recognising the affinities between this voyage and the journey of the graduating cohorts who will soon be forging their own paths outside of school, the branding and design application conveys a sense of travel into the unknown. It features various elements that hark back to the voyager’s narrative – with the key visual of the golden disc that takes after the Golden Voyager Record’s form, the secondary visuals of terrain rendering that allude to new landscapes and trajectories as well as the colour palette of gold/silver against the backdrop of black that is commonly associated with science-fiction and space operas. The ADM Grad Show encompassed of various facets such as a website and publication to feature the cohort’s portfolio and the event details, a virtual tour to document the exhibition long after its runtime, an interactive photo booth that captured real-time engagement and interaction, a publicity video, a photoshoot session of the graduating cohort as well as spatial and wayfinding elements.

The copy-driven approach of the design references that of travel tour agencies and plays on such catchy and trite brand of conviviality and hospitality. The zines relied on the typographic styles found on the 70s – 80s shop-signs in Lorong Mambong that have stood the test of time. The colours were picked from the changing coat of paint on the facade of Holland Road Shopping Centre through it’s different eras.

—Staff Pick, Fonts In Use Here

“Singapore studio Currency design one of the most stylish exhibition zines we’ve seen”
—Lucy Burton, It’s Nice That Read here

Dreamseeds Arts Fest is a celebration of the creative explorations undertaken by Club Rainbow Singapore’s beneficiaries. The inaugural edition of the festival uses the seedling as a symbol of empowerment and a mascot of growth. The design also allows an element of interaction with the beneficiaries, through the creation of abstract plant and cloud shapes that beneficiaries are encouraged to add their own touch to.

Like the event name, the identity for the inaugural edition of State of Motion is inspired by the moiré effect: a visual perception of motion that occurs when viewing a set of lines superimposed on another set of lines. This sense of movement also reflects the event’s (re)imagination of films and their locations through art while also capturing the condition of Singapore as one in constant motion.

Design Piracy Institute (DPI) is an applied thesis project developed at the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Design Criticism (D-Crit)—now known as the MA Design Research, Writing & Criticism, by Justin Zhuang on piracy and industrial design. DPI’s design identity is inspired by traditional forms and perceptions of piracy. It uses the imperfect and awkward English form of the MS Gothic/Mincho family, a versatile and interchangeable Japanese typeface, as a nod to the amateur, the wrong, and the illegal — a homage to how this freely available Microsoft Office typeface is often used on the design of pirated products as well. The idea is further explored with the intentional untampered kerning (default tracking) of the wordmark, challenging the traditional notions of ‘good’ design.

This type-based system is accompanied by a graphical element in the form of a yellow ‘X’, which recalls watermark symbols and also the cross found on the stereotypical skull and bones ☠  logo of the pirate flag. Unlike watermarks that protect, however, this symbol dissolves when documents marked with DPI’s identity is photocopied.

EXODUS album cover is a post-futurist interpretation of 80s mandarin vinyl album covers such as Teresa Teng and Faye Wong. The album is a sonic imagining or a “夢” (dream) of a dystopian post-apocalyptic tableau. The cover features a tableau of a woman lying in a pool of her own blood, awashed in neon colors, reminiscent of the popularised Hong Kong neon cityscape in visual culture.