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The year 2013 was indeed a big year for Indonesia Design magazine as we got to celebrate our 10th year anniversary. What originally started as a bilingual bimonthly magazine, focusing mainly on architecture and interior, has now evolved to become a leading design magazine in Indonesia featuring all design related coverage including lifestyle, art, product and even fashion. Let us reveal the story behind our 10th Anniversary celebration that combined the collaboration of many great design talents.
AS OUR BIG 10th YEAR APPROACHED
Indonesia Design magazine went into a design evolution and decided to expand our core coverage. The road to our 10th Anniversary celebration started internally when our art director, Canny Sutanto, created a contemporary clean appearance with subtle masculine lines to give an updated look to our layout. Besides that, she also designed a new identity logo for Indonesia Design that is modern yet playful featuring a small letter “i” (with changeable color on the dot) and capital “D”.
Canny, who has seasons of experience when it comes to magazine design, graduated from Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts in Sydney, Australia. She loves to draw random sketches and experimenting with Photoshop while, besides being our art director, she is currently studying at the ‘HochschulefürKünste’ (University of the Arts) Bremem in Germany for a Master’s Program in Digital Media.
In order to establish a memorable impact with our new outlook, we felt the need to implement a different approach: Instead of featuring photos from one of our editorial stories on the cover, we decided to contact one of the finest graphicdesign artists in Jakarta, SantiRivai, and asked her to create a special design cover for our 10th Anniversary edition. The design manifested to become the attractive two dimensional colorfulimage of abstract bricks symbolizing the number 10. With the cover’s white background, the designmatched perfectly with our magazine’s new clean approach and modern feel. As she explains: “I was trying to distill the idea of architecture and the idea of ‘design’ (which has quite a broad scope) into the simplest concept: hence the wall for architecture, and the idea of colored bricks to sort of symbolize design. And because this was the 10th Anniversary, I want to be able to show this as well. While I was researching, I saw a picture, and that struck me as the perfect avenue to show the meeting of architecture and design, so I used that as my starting point.”
Santi went to Boston University to study journalism and creative writing, before continuing to pursue an MFA in graphic design. Since returning to Jakarta almost ten years ago, she hascreated brand identities for many big commercial companies from cinemas, restaurants, to even performing arts’ productions. Her experience also guided her design process for this project that started with intensive research into our history.
“I took a look at the various incarnations of the magazine starting from its earlier years until the most recent issue. I’ve also worked with the team before this, because I worked with them for their 9th Anniversary event, so I’ve had some familiarity with their approach. The magazine was also going through a slight re-branding at the time, so the new visual approach was taken into account as well. And from there it was just about doing explorations to see what approach might fit the 10th Anniversary cover best.”
This design does not only fit our anniversary cover, but also became the core design to our 10th Anniversary celebration. We passed on the graphic design artwork to the renowned Indonesian contemporary artist based in Bali, PintorSirait, to create our first ever Indonesia Design Best Design (iD-BD) Award trophy. As an artist who is well known for his metal work (including stainless steel, copper and corten steel), Pintor translated thedesign from two dimensions into three dimensions. “I imagined that it would be interesting to make something with blocks, a kind of ‘modern’ architectural shape which has traditional patterns etched on two sides of the blocks.”
Pintor literally took the two dimensional graphic and molded it into a three dimensional object that feels and looks slightly different from each angel. He also modified the original design by adding traditional Indonesian pattern etching as counter points in this composition. Some sides of the blocks are painted in the same colors as in the original graphic design artwork and others are not. “As in many forms of art and design as creators of objects we are often posed with the question when is it appropriate to apply color and when is it more artistic not to do any thing. The basic color theme was decided by your logo, but the ‘invisible’ sides are open for different possibilities, I guess, these areas became my mini playground to figure out.”
Using stainless steel as the material, Pintor – who graduated in liberal arts study from the University of Nevada-Reno in America – explained that it is actually very challenging to make art with metal because of its industrial quality. To find ways tomake this metal feel softer and to create textures is actually part of the work that he enjoys the most. Within five weeks time, Pintor and his team managed to produce our iD-BD Award’s trophy that could be handed over to our selected winners during the 10th Anniversary celebration.
As the venue of choice for our 10th Anniversary celebration was Mozaic Beach Club in Seminyak, Bali; we reached out to the awarded Kevala Ceramics design team based in Sanur. With the guidance of the director of Kevala Ceramics, Wendy Thomas, at their studio cum workshop, we once again passed on our 10th Anniversary edition’s cover design for Kevala Ceramics to interpret.
The idea was to have their product items as souvenir to be given to all of our invited guests during the evening of the celebration.
Together Wendy and her team tried to find the best three dimensional object to transform into the perfect souvenir. It was anonymously decided to use a cheese plate, as it has a flat surface that would simplify the process to imprint the graphic design artwork onto it. The production process of these cheese plates, with our design on it as a glazed finishing, was not as simple as we originally thought it would be.
The intricate details of the design required a high consistency hand carving technique while the shape of the 22 x 18 cm cheese plate resembled the quarto shape emulating our magazine’s form. Only 220 plates were manufactured and given to guests who attended our 10th Anniversary event last October.
KevalaCeramics team started by making a molding from seraplast material. The casting process was done by pouring liquid clay into the mold before letting it set for a couple of hours. The sketch on the plates was done one at a time, all the while heeding the accuracy and proportion of the pattern. After the clay hardened a bit, they continued with the color process using a brushing technique. Done by hand, this detailed process needed precision and neatness and therefore it took about 20 to 30 minutes to finish the decoration of each plate.
After the plates were completely dry, a finishing and firing process ensued by inserting the plates into an oven (kiln) that was set to 1,000o Celsius for 7 hours. Then the plates were taken out and a layer of clear glaze coating was applied before they were placed back into the kiln for another 7 hours at a temperature of 1,230o Celsius. At the final stage the inscription ‘Celebrating TEN YEARS of Indonesia Design’ sticker was applied on the surface and the plates went back into the oven for another 4 hours at 600o Celsius.
Once we had the well-designed cheese plate, the last requirement was the gift or goodie bag for our guests to carry it away in. We contacted the talented Indonesian bag makers, RauufRaheem, for their support with this task. Founded by Tania LatiefIstyaji in 2010, RauufRaheem is known for its handmade bag collection and clutches embedded with stunning semi precious stones and crystals. When we contacted Tania for her expertise, she immediately thought of a rectangle tote shape bag to enhance the functionality.
Inspired by Indonesia Design’s brand identity colors, red and black, Tania decided to infuse the same color hues into the bag’s design. With the bag’s dimension being 80 x 45cm and 60cm long for the bag strap, this vertical shape of tote bag had one side made in red leather while the opposite side is made out of black leather. Our magazine logo was carefully imprinted on the top center of the bag in gold color. The simple design of this bag ignited not only a bold impression but also a sense of uniqueness.
To make an even more memorable event out of our 10th year anniversary celebration, we decided to also try using digital design as part of our entertainment during the evening. With the rise of the video-mapping trend around the world, we strongly felt that this digital design will definitely become the “it” factor of our event. To achieve this objective, we were first introduced to a brand new Australian digital screen product called Vizo. This lightweight 13,3 inch high-definition screen is very unique because you can wear it! As the latest successful marketing stunt in Australia, Vizo screen can be connected through WIFI or Bluetooth to another devices and it also comes with a custom suit. It was the perfect gimmick that we were looking for.
Aside from Vizo, we also worked with our partner and client: Datascrip – who supported us by providing a Panasonic EX-16K projector. Considered to be the latest and the most sophisticated of its line, this amazing 16,000 lumen projector that has a projection capability for up to a 600-inch screen size. We installed this projector on the highest roof of Mozaic Beach club juxtaposing the blue swimming pool to get the best coverage of our video-mapping plan. By having two of these high-tech devices for our event, what we needed next was just a digital design maestro: Introducing Matthew Hudders aka DJ Golddigger.
Known as one of Bali’s top DJs, Matthew is recognized for his skill of combining the music that he plays with original video clips of the songs projected onto the screen behind him. Using computer software programming, he makes thevideo clip on the screen change and follow his music. When wecontacted him for this project, Matthew immediately came up with some ideas by combiningvarious geometric motifs and dots to be projected on the Vizo screen, as well as onto the pool, using the Panasonic EX-16K projector. It was quite exciting for our guests and for us on the eve of the celebration to see this digital design concept worked exactly as expected. It was an unusual concept of entertainment and surely memorable.
Appreciating the giant collaborative effort behind our 10th year anniversary we acknowledge the fantastic supports of all of those involved by sharing this behind the scenes story. A perfect design consists of many elements; so did our 10th year anniversary. We are honored to have the support of all these talented people. As our guests were being welcomed at the chic Mozaic Beach Club by a classical string quartet, and finger foods from the kitchen of the celebrated chef Chris Salans, it all came together and completed a decade in print with an evening of designed style and most of all fun.
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