Design Commissions
Laura Pappa created the graphic design for the New Material Award 2018.
New Material Award 2018
The 15 nominees for the New Material Award 2018 all shared an interest in reuse. Therefore, this topic featured in Laura Pappa's graphic design principles for the award. "Many of the nominees were working with recycling, residual material use or new applications for waste products," she says. "I was also interested in applying these values to graphic design and investigated possibilities in consultation with the printer. I had one large poster printed for each nominee, which were placed with the work to provide information during the exhibition. The publication text was then printed over these posters. I then used the sheets from the publication as captions for the exhibition's presentation at the Vitra Museum in Basel. As such, I used the same material three times, each time in a new way."
To ensure that the different printing layers avoided an overly busy design, Pappa opted for functional and straightforward typography, using the Pirelli Bold font developed by Jung-Lee Type Foundry. The design is notable for its overlapping textual layers and especially its use of colour. The poster texts formed the first layer and were printed in soft pink. The publication text was printed over this in bright blue ink. The photos provide additional colour to the publication. "I used photos of nominees at work because the development process was as at least as interesting as the different end products," says Pappa. The publication was given a simple stapled binding, and the pages on the right weren't cropped, leaving the process of the book's production visible. From poster to publication to information sheet for the final presentation, the process reflects the work of the New Material Award nominees and Pappa's analytical approach to the design brief. .
Read the publication New Material Award 2018
From 2009 to 2020, the New Material Award was an important catalyst for innovative design research. Every two years, artists and designers were awarded the prize for their contribution to material innovation in the service of ecological and social sustainability. The New Material Award was a springboard for a generation of designers that dare to ask fundamental questions about industrial production processes, natural growth, waste flows and residual materials. This is regularly done in collaboration with scientific partners.
New Material Award 2018. Graphic design Laura Pappa
Laura Pappa
Laura Pappa is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. Commissions include Kunstverein Toronto, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museum of Estonian Architecture, project space ROZENSTRAAT and Valiz Publishers. Together with Elisabeth Klement, Pappa leads the Asterisk Summer School, an annual summer graphic design programme in Tallinn and curated the Signals from the Periphery exhibition at Tallinn Art Hall in 2017. She taught at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and the Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn.