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Design Profile

They have one of the longest names in the business, do creative and well-thought-out work for a list of clients that many design companies would give their eye-teeth for, and they only set up just over three years ago. Natalie Avella went to east London to meet the ladies behind A Practice for Everyday Life to talk about fruit, veg and pushing the boundaries of minimalism.

Refusing to serve any apprenticeship at established graphic design studios, Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas started their own - A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL) - immediately after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003. Since then, their work, particularly for art institutions including the ICA and Tate Modern, has been prolific. It’s hard to believe their practice is just a few years old and these women are still only in their mid-twenties.

Before meeting at the RCA Carter had studied graphic design at the University of Brighton and Thomas at Camberwell College of Arts. One of the reasons they believe they immediately clicked - both as friends and as work colleagues - was because both grew up in small rural towns: Thomas in Harrogate and Carter in Newmarket. They had a similar sort of ‘Englishness’ in common. Today, although based in London’s Bethnal Green and a world away from the village greens, chintzy tea rooms, country pubs and agricultural fairs of their upbringings, there are still signs that they continue to draw inspiration from their childhoods. On the wall of their studio is a collection of entry badges for village country shows close to their family homes that, despite being in different regions, are displayed because they are so similar graphically.

For the annual V&A Village Fête - a summer event in which thirty different designers, architects and studios exhibit a stall in the museum’s courtyard - they designed a poster which drew on shared childhood memories of competitions at traditional village fetes, such as ‘most freakish vegetable’ or ‘prize-winning fruits’. The poster comprised a chart displaying freak fruit and vegetables, each representing a different designer or studio. Every visitor had a Judge’s Guide so that they could walk around the stalls taking notes and judging for themselves.

The rural vernacular doesn’t often (or perhaps apparently) occur in their work, most of which is distinctly urbane and minimal; with its white space and very structured use of scale, it refers instead to the built and manmade environment rather than the organic forms of nature and pastoral ideals of country living. Their heavily researched work avoids superfluous decoration and the pair has a strong dislike of pastiche. Yet behind much of the minimalism there lurks the same fascination with oddness, eccentricity or deadpan quirkiness that is most obviously revealed in the V&A poster. Often their work involves taking very peculiar ideas and giving them a sort of aesthetic formality. Carter suggests this is what one commentator meant when they suggested APFEL ‘pushes the boundaries of minimalism’.

‘Our work can feel very familiar but at the same time feel strange and uncanny,’ adds Thomas. ‘It’s like when you have to do a double take on something that looks very ordinary but not quite.’

They seem to share a similar sensibility with their clients, such as fashion designers Rubecksen Yamanaka whose clothes seem, at first sight, extremely simple with their fine tailoring and muted colours, but which are derived from peculiarly eclectic sources of inspiration. One season’s collection was inspired by the yarn of camel humps, another by the velvety folds of animals’ ears, and another by the dried grasses of the hula-hula skirt. Initially their ideas are quite different but when you look at the collections you wouldn’t notice,’ says Carter. ‘So we decided with their invitations to go back to being quite literal.’ One invitation features typography formed by hand-drawn golden grasses, another has an illustration of a pair of dog-ears.

Peculiar aesthetics prevailed at Berlin gallery Klosterfelde’s exhibition Wrong for which APFEL created the graphic identity. The show was a deliberate attempt to disobey the codes and conventions of standard art curation by using art that didn’t function properly, or fit into a canon or any context, or that was simply fake. Carter explains: ‘In Berlin apartments have these in-between spaces where they store bikes and things. The curator made this space into a tiny gallery with a huge amount of work displayed in it and everything about it is ‘wrong’. With the graphics we took on the same mentality. On the invites we slipped off the name of the artist, exposing the spaces that we use but no one ever sees.’

‘All the captions are 6-point so they are really difficult to read,’ adds Thomas. ‘Our aim was to highlight the idea of the show in the graphics.’ Wrong was curated by Jens Hoffmann, the director of exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) with whom they’ve developed such a strong working relationship that they’ve designed the identity and graphics for every ICA show since their project there, Beck’s Futures in 2005.

The idea that Hoffmann might keep using them in order to get a consistent look, therefore achieving a sort of subliminal branding, is quickly dismissed by the duo. ‘I don’t think there is such a similar look to our work,’ says Thomas. ‘Each project is visually very different but maybe people can pick up on a similar way of thinking or a similar approach to these projects and recognise it from us even though they feel very different.’

‘It’s very important for Jens to have a different identity for each show,’ says Carter, ‘so each show becomes its own being rather than a branded template like, say, what the Barbican do.’ They put their continued cooperation down to the ease of communication and like-mindedness between them and the exhibitions team at the ICA. ‘We’re quite particular that who we’re working with should be of like minds,’ says Carter. ‘And that has really determined the practice so far. We feel really comfortable with all the people we’ve worked with, conversation comes really easily and a certain trust has been built up. We don’t have to keep asking questions. All our clients so far have trusted us completely.’

The identity for the 2005 Beck’s Futures - the annual show celebrating emerging talent in contemporary art that is sponsored by the beer company - took its inspiration from the stripy green and white or red and white tents of beer festivals. ‘It’s nice because it kind of pleases the sponsors,’ says Carter. ‘It reinforces the brand; they’re putting a huge amount of money behind the prize after all. But we don’t necessarily agree with brand prizes. It’s using it but being playful with it so that it can be taken on many different levels.’ One of the main reasons, however, that they took the beer tents as a visual cue was that when they were first commissioned for the project they new very little about what art was to be contained in the show.

Most of APFEL’s work for art institutions involves an extremely close relationship with the art or artist. They particularly enjoy unravelling or revealing the process of an artist’s work. A good example of this is in the exhibition graphics for the ICA’s Continuous Project Altered Daily, the first comprehensive survey of British artist Jonathan Monk. This involved the display of over sixty artworks made between 1993 and 2005. ‘Because so much work was involved, the art on display was altered daily,’ says Thomas. ‘In the lower gallery was a storeroom where the majority of the work was kept and where visitors could witness the gallery manager dealing with this work, unpacking it, writing down whether there were any scratches, and deciding what would be displayed in the gallery upstairs. It was exposing the process of what a gallery manager has to do.’ The identity the duo came up with for the show feels like a body of archival material. From a silkscreen-print poster to a labelling system and a daily diary, the material helps the space to run effectively as an exhibition.

This revealing of the creative process extends also to their editorial design. Their biggest project to date has been an award-winning redesign of The Architects’ Journal. Instead of looking at other editorial design, they borrowed graphic detail from the processes of architectural design. Thomas explains: ‘We looked at the working process of architects, such as how they handle images and how they deal with their research material. What differentiates AJ from other magazines such as Architectural Review is that they’re so intent on communicating the architectural process from start to finish, all the nitty-gritty, rather than just the glamorous finished project. From us this was really inspiring because that is what we also enjoy doing: revealing the process.’

They transformed the magazine - which despite its fine content had always looked like a cheap advert-driven trade magazine - by using a very clean font called Akkurat, simplifying the design and encouraging the use of commissioned photographers rather than a continued dependence on images supplied by architects. ‘The main thing we wanted to achieve was this line along the top where the main images hang off as though pinned to a wall, which we’d noticed when we went to a few architects’ crits where they hang their work up to show the process of the building,’ explains Carter. Sometimes the images overlap, at other times they are side by side.

Another approach to graphic design they enjoy is the three-dimensional, when graphic design isn’t just image but becomes an object too. Their identity for Martha Rosler’s London Garage Sale exhibition at the ICA borrowed the visual language of the car boot sale, with an A5-sized invitation designed with holes punched into the top and bottom edges, which could easily be attached to lampposts as signs to advertise the coming event.

A good chance for them to play with the three-dimensional has been in their work for Tate Modern Start, the educational arm of the art gallery. The idea behind their game Building Explorer was for the children to explore the building rather than the work on display. The front and back covers of an A4 booklet include a pop-out yellow hard hat and a pop-out cardboard ruler and protractor which encourage the children to take on the role of architect/building surveyor for the gallery through dressing up and making drawings just as the grown-up professional would. APFEL has worked on many games with Tate Modern’s Start: others include Art Star, a newspaper for visitors to learn more about Andy Warhol that contains elements such as DIY Warhol Blotting Painting and the opportunity to make up your own Newspaper Headline on the pull-out centrefold.

APFEL hopes to bring this idea of the object into their future work. They also hope to carry their design off the page by creating pieces of permanence such as signage for an institution. Other future plans include working on more projects abroad - it looks certain that at some point in the near future they’ll find themselves in San Francisco where Jens Hoffmann has taken up the directorship of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. These one-time country girls are not afraid to admit that, while London is great, APFEL’s future looks decidedly global.

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