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Three design stories 🍸
With Nika Simovich Fisher.
Design direction by Nika Simovich Fisher
This week, we launched Invisible Nightlife Review, an Italo Calvino-inspired edition of our ongoing series The Nightlife Review.
We worked with students at The New School through their instructor, Nika Simovich Fisher, who also handled the design direction for the project. Last month, we also had Nika on Tasteland to discuss her work as a writer, web designer and strategist.
Below are three projects we discussed on the podcast. Keep scrolling if you prefer to listen to the full episode!
I was born in Belgrade, and at that time it was still Yugoslavia. And that particular year, the country was in a war, the Soviet Union collapsed recently, and also the internet was starting to take form and become more widespread.
Growing up, I always spoke Serbian at home. And I grew up primarily in California. So we preserved the culture within our household. I wrote this piece when I was in grad school, and I was looking at how type has data embedded into it. And I was really interested in looking at old type files that you can't access anymore. Serbian is pretty interesting because they use both the Latin text and also the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.
I interviewed this woman, Olivera Stojadinović, and she was responsible for creating an edit of Times New Roman to have some of the Serbian characters.
I was curious, were people still using the Cyrillic alphabet? Why don't you see it online anymore? At the time that this country was falling apart, the West was really pushing forward the internet. And so a lot of standards about online communication are built in English. I interviewed this woman, Olivera Stojadinović, and she was responsible for creating an edit of Times New Roman to have some of the Serbian characters. When I interviewed her, she told me she was really embarrassed about this actually, because it was like adopting a Serbian hat on somebody else's Western typeface. And so it inspired her to create all of her own typefaces that were homegrown specifically for the Serbian alphabet that had both Cyrillic and Latin text.
During the nineties, you had to use special character encoding to get these letters to appear. People were distributing typefaces on USB drives, and if you didn't have it, you would have brackets in place of the correct letters. So the language just wasn't supported on the internet.
It is interesting how you can make something online and then it takes on a different life and you don't always know how other people are going to interact with it and how that will change the meaning.
I was interested in experimenting with the web browser as a medium. And I was working at Kate Spade at the time as an in-house graphic designer, I was working in ad agencies. So I was doing a lot of work for other people and not so much for myself. And I have always liked to draw.
At the time, I was thinking about if there's a way of bringing in that warmth that happens when you're sketching and you have this inherent brushstroke. And if it's possible to put that online. So I scanned my illustrations, and then I digitized them in Illustrator, and I put all of the different flowers on different layers.
I was working at Kate Spade at the time as an in-house graphic designer
Parallax scrolling is in video games when someone looks like they're walking, but it's actually just the background moving. And that's exactly what's happening when you move your cursor and all the different layers shift. And they're paired with quotes about gardening that could be interpreted as advice for life.
I put it up and I forgot about it. But then over time, I kept seeing it circulated. 10 years later, I got an email from this publishing house in Austria, and they said they were working on this book for Zora Klipp, who is a German cook. And she wanted to use these illustrations on this book that they're producing. So it really was this creative project from the past coming back. And I ended up re-releasing it as a limited edition collection on a USB with Metalabel.
In terms of the design, I wanted something that felt ephemeral, but also had a nod to the original book covers. Having something that could be repeatable and having a visual language to it that had some sort of hidden meaning was important. And I also really liked this idea of developing a fictional environment.
On desktop, the table of contents rotates around slowly, working like a clock.
So the website itself shuts down—it's only online from 12 to 6 am. It also straddles this idea of being nostalgic and contemporary. The two typefaces we're using, one is called Visual by AllCaps, and it’s a modern-day pixel typeface, but it's also very smooth. And then Ivory from Lineto is like a 1970s serif. It's very weighty. There's not a lot of contrast. So there's a lot of heaviness to the site. And then there's these moments that are fleeting, like it's not online all the time.
On desktop, the table of contents rotates around slowly, working like a clock. And I used illustrations that I drew with a Sharpie and then scanned. So yeah, I think there's a lot of friction and tension between weight and time. 🕰️
FULL EPISODE
