Written by Roos Giethoorn / Graphic Design Festival 2010 publication #1

When I met Axel Peemoeller (GER) and Paul Fuog (AUS) they were sitting side-by-side. This image soon appeared to be fairly rare. Axel and Paul met about 6 years ago in Melbourne since then they have been working together collectively from different parts of the world. These global designers have both worked for diverse clients over a big part of the globe: Australia, Indonesia and Northern America and pretty much everywhere in Europe. Currently they are working together on a new identity for the Victorian College of Arts and Music in Melbourne. Working with clients through the internet is great, but concepting and designing side-by-side works way better. After the VCAM project they will be working in Europe, Barcelona on self-initiated projects.

Their out-of-the-box thinking, shared vision, love for design and the life around it made them decide to get together. The need to find a different approach for the design solution and creative work with an experimental feel has helped them to find clients who are looking for smart and different design solutions with a certain trickiness about it.

Decoding is what they do in general. Every design they make, has some level of system behind it. Every solution has a process of extracting. You could say they even decode themselves by playing around like they were in kindergarten again. Experimenting, folding paper together or making models out of pencils.

For the poster project during the Graphic Design Festival they took their experiment to another level. They brought in another D, they went from 2D to 3D. By using the oxymoron “Pretty-Ugly” which can be read as just “Pretty” or “Ugly” but in combination reads “Pretty Ugly”. With materials found in dumpsters and hardware stores these visual explorers started to build an semi-improvised poster. The Pretty letters are build from wood pieces found in dumpsters. The black tubes, originally used for watering systems in gardens, is used for the word Ugly.

Their improvisation skills were put to the test after having to cancel their initial idea, but they proved to be awfully good in ‘re-creating’ this ‘happy fault’ into a ‘controlled chaos’.

Copyright 2010 Roos Giethoorn