After the Rain

writer Stephen Banham published Desktop Magazine

When it rains, I am happy. Why? Because I know it’s time to expand my collection. My Rainbow Collection.

The observation and collection of things into sets can be a powerful resource for design, creating links and themes that may inform the design process. One of the sets collected by the studio for some 15 years or so has been what we call the Rainbow Collection (yes, a reference to Kermit the frog). The prevalence of domestic ink jet printers in the past decade or so has led to the most beautiful set of ‘graphic design watercolours’ emerging after rainfall. The topics of course are domestic in nature – garage sales and lost dogs – and this lends them an intimacy absent in much graphic design.

The unintended illegibility of the bleeding lettering transforms the handwritten to an abstracted stream of colour. And unlike most graphic design, this process is a completely natural one, reminding us that design does in fact exist in an outside and beautifully organic world.