Really honored with this feature in the Chinese Design 360° Magazine.
Work for Dazed x Nike
Work for Dazed x Nike. Visit dazeddigital.com/issuezero for the full experience!
Three different artists had to dig into the Nike and Dazed archives, reimagining the past to create the future. The result is 'Issue Zero', a digital magazine that showcases three different approaches to one journey, taking inspiration from existing materials to imagine the new. Dazed and Nike joined forces to find new, sustainable ways to create art, by sharing resources and digging through existing materials, inspired by Nike's “Move To Zero” ethos.
While browsing through the Nike archive I found myself zooming in on the printed raster of the scan. Something I find so beautiful, to see the touch of the ink on the paper and see the age. All these dots together forming one full image. When thinking about an online raster, you can look at a pixel as being circular in a way. Impossible amounts of designs can come out of this. This brought me to the fact that, as a designer, I often think in ISO 216 terms. This growing and dividing concept is really appealing to me. I have always been fascinated by the Fibonacci sequence in nature. From one small element we get these amazing complex multiplying forms that can go on forever.
This is a multifunctional publication, something large that can be reduced to something small and vice versa. By zooming in on the Nike archive (old) and combining it with contemporary typography (new) new images have been created that can be seen as posters but at the same time they are very multifunctional: you can transform the publication in a new one by combining posters or cut up posters into smaller pieces. Nothing goes to waste in this design. Every element can stand on its own and yet everything together is a whole. Old and new side by side, history and the ‘now’ go hand in hand. Pixels meet rasters and become friends.
Motion by Lucas Hesse and sound by Oval Angle
'A(BC) walk in the park with S. Specht and N. Reseke' - a one (cold) day project 🥶
Hej Nanna
From October on, @nannareseke and I will join forces. 🙌🏻 After her internship we stayed connected and worked on some projects together but from next month on it’s more serious. She just finished her MA at @graphicdesignantwerp — Looking forward, Nanna! You are so talented!
Honored to be one of 8 ambassadors for Plantin-Moretus museum this Summer!
Honored to be one of 8 ambassadors for @plantinmoretus museum this Summer. Other ambassadors: duo Charlotte Dumortier and Karen Spiessens, Dirk Claessen, Axel Goossens, Atelier 11 and Jasper Van Gestel.
The Museum Plantin-Moretus is the residential house of the Plantin-Moretus family which contains the publishing house – printing press. The oldest printing presses in the world are here. They bear witness to the first industrial distribution of knowledge and image. The rich art collection is located in the historical residence, including paintings from family friend Peter Paul Rubens. The residence as well as the printing establishment is on UNESCO’s prestigious World Heritage list.
We’ll be given carte blanche to interpret the museums great collection of woodcuts. You’ll be able to follow my process from inspiration to final result in my Instagram stories and @plantinmoretus socials. Make sure to check their huge collection for free at impressedbyplantin.be
https://www.museumplantinmoretus.be/nl/StephanieSpecht
https://www.museumplantinmoretus.be/nl/content/acht-antwerpse-kunstenaars-krijgen-carte-blanche
Stephanie Specht / Guest 25 — Design Interview 1Q
Interview with @designinterview10q by @archiviodimario. In this moment, while everything is stopping, graphic designer Fabio Mario Rizzotti, the creator of Design Interview 1Q, wants to talk about design. Therefore he invites experts for an interview, trying to understand which are their philosophies that we usually admire and we take inspiration by. The interviews are based on 10 questions with topics like the essence of design, education, future, design process, perfection, internet, and others.
Mario had and will have guests such as: PaulaScher, @martens__martens, @studiomut, @erik_brandt, @heystudio, @studiodumbar, @anthonyburrill and many others. It’s amazing that all these great designers are joining and supporting this project. The design world needs to be ready tomorrow to start all over again, and maybe with a different perspective of the world and of what design is. 🙏🏻 Photo by @madsteglers 🌱
Instagram Live Session during Corona quarantine Times for for Two Pages project
Instagram Live session during Corona quarantine times for Two Pages Project. - https://twopagesproject.com/ - https://www.instagram.com/two_pages_project/
It's Nice That – International Womxn’s Day
It’s Nice That celebrated International Womxn’s Day by finding out who some of their favourite women and non-binary creatives’ very own favourites were, collated together in a list of 100 brilliant creatives to be inspired by. They picked 10 women and I am so honored to be included in their selection. Read more here: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/100-womxn-and-non-binary-creatives-to-be-inspired-by-international-womxns-day-090320
This year we’re celebrating International Womxn’s Day by finding out who some of our favourite women and non-binary creatives’ very own favourites are, collated together in a list of 100 brilliant creatives to be inspired by.
For the past few years, we have celebrated International Womxn’s Day by dedicating It’s Nice That to championing womxn working in the creative industries and the incredible breadth of work that they produce. In the process, we’ve investigated crossing the gender divide in textiles, discussed why there’s a lack of womxn in animation and heard from several new mums returning to work after maternity leave. We’ve also chatted to the likes of Anne Lund, Nadia Lee Cohen, Malika Favre, Natasha Jen, Tea Uglow and Joana Choumali, and Yumna Al-Arashi.
However, this year we decided to focus all our efforts into championing as many voices as possible in one place, collating 100 womxn and non-binary creatives to be inspired by this International Womxn’s Day and beyond.
To do this, we got in touch with ten creatives whose work, process and outlook we admire in order to find out which womxn and non-binary creatives working today keep them inspired. The following list is a mix of illustrators, stylists, comedians, activists, photographers and designers, each of whom represents what it means to be a womxn in the creative industry today: nuanced, empowering, hilarious, smart, ridiculously talented, and everything in between.
Next time you’re looking for a creative to commission, a speaker at your conference or someone to interview, we hope this list will be a valuable resource and will stop our industry falling on the usual names – let’s not forget that the UK creative industry alone remains 60 per cent male and 90 per cent white. We have discovered so many new names through this process and hope you do too.
Stephanie Specht
Belgian graphic designer Stephanie Specht runs Studio Specht, a design practice with a focus on brand identity, illustration and book design.
Working as a graphic designer to much acclaim over the past decade is Stephanie Specht, a Belgian designer with an art direction eye we absolutely adore. Rich and varied in her use of colour, typography and playful layouts, each project of Stephanie’s is somehow even better than the last – all because of her unique creative intuition.
Choosing her fellow graphic design peers as her creative womxn picks, the first is Crystal Zapata, a designer based in Chicago who, despite having only met her once, “I liked her a lot,” she says. “She was passing by Antwerp and since we only knew each other through Instagram, we thought it’d be great to meet up in person. We had a coffee and a super nice talk.” Ever since Stephanie has watched Crystal grow as a designer in style, admiring from afar: “She’s so free in her work,” she continues, “something I also really find important: to be able to renew, reinvent yourself all the time. Not an easy thing these days as a designer, but she’s good at it and it inspires me!”
Another designer is Sara De Bondt, who Stephanie has always admired and “even though I don’t know her personally that well, Sara played a big role in my life,” she tells It’s Nice That. Back in 2016 Sara advised Kali Nikitas, the chair of communication arts and founding chair of the MFA graphic design program at Otis College of Art, to visit Stephanie’s studio. “After that, Kali invited me twice to come to Otis for a residency, where I met some of the other female designers on my list: Tanya Rubbak, All the Way To Paris and Hezin O. I’m grateful for all these beautiful connections!”
Stephanie’s list in full:
Graphic designer Crystal Zapata
Antwerp neighbour and designer Ines Cox
Design educator Kali Nikitas
Designer Tanya Rubbak
Tanja and Petra from design studio All the Way to Paris
Designer Sigrid Calon
Designer Sara De Bondt
Type designer Charlotte Rohde
Her colleague and designer Ine Meganck
Designer Hezin O
Lecture about Anne Tyng – March 6, 2020 – Princeton University School of Architecture
Some snippets of a lecture that I designed for and put together with Sigrid Adriaenssens (PhD—Associate Professor Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University) about the transformation and geometry in architect Anne Tyng’s work! This is part of the 2020 Women in Design and Architecture Conference at Princeton University School of Architecture. The work Sigrid will be presenting tomorrow, arose out of a conversation we had a few weeks ago. We are also working on a publication that will be published later this year. The event is free and open to the public! Go see her!
About the 2020 Women in Design and Architecture Conference:
This annual conference celebrates the work and legacy of a pivotal female architect or designer with contributions from international historians and scholars, in addition to artists, curators, and practitioners. This year it’s about Anne Tyng. Through independent projects, in addition to her work with architects Louis Kahn and Pier Luigi Nervi, Tyng explored geometry as it relates to natural form and construction. She approached design as a process and profession through teaching and writing, addressing the social, psychological, and experiential dynamics of creativity and collaboration; her work has influenced other practitioners as well as models of practice.
Specht Notes Forms at Printed Matter in New York
Specht Notes Forms book is now for sale at Printed Matter in New York. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/55871
Specht Notes Forms at Counter-Print
My book #spechtnotesforms is available in the U.K via @counterprintbooks 🧡
https://www.counter-print.co.uk/collections/all-books/products/specht-notes-forms
This is a first edition of 100 copies — photos below by Counter Print — Books also for sale in Antwerp at @copyrightbookshop and soon in the U.S via @drawdownbooks @printedmatterinc — Few copies also available on my webshop. 🍊🟠
This is (was) Talking Letterheads
Some photos of the event last Saturday.
Tune in Phantom Radio (91.0 FM) or drop by the Design Museum’s Vitrine space (Drabstraat) for a marathon of radio interviews with contemporary Belgian graphic designers, hosted by Gerard Herman & Dylan Belgrado. Gerard Herman is an artist based in Antwerp who creates installations, animation films, soundscapes and printed matter. Phantom Radio is a nomadic radio station by Ine Meganck and Valentijn Goethals, originally conceived in collaboration with Paul Elliman as an unconventional space for students, designers, musicians and artists to parasitize the airwaves together. Ine Meganck is a graphic designer and Valentijn Goethals is an artist and artistic director of Kunsthal Gent.
Participating designers: Atelier Brenda, atelier Haegeman Temmerman, Paul Boudens, Geoffrey Brusatto, Goda Budvytytė, Michaël Bussaer & Jef Cuypers, Ines Cox, D-E-A-L, Sara De Bondt, Manuela Dechamps Otamendi, Luc Derycke, Thomas Desmet, Jan & Randoald, Mads Freund Brunse, Loraine Furter, Tom Hautekiet, Ward Heirwegh, Will Holder, Oliver Ibsen, Alexis Jacob, Inge Ketelers, Joris Kritis, Roxanne Maillet, Ine Meganck & Chloé D’hauwe, Julie Peeters, Josse Pyl, Bas Rogiers, Ronny & Johny, ruttens-wille, Amina Saâdi, Specht Studio, Triangle Books, Caroline Wolewinski
This is Talking Letterheads
Tune in Phantom Radio (91.0 FM) or drop by the Design Museum’s Vitrine space (Drabstraat) for a marathon of radio interviews with contemporary Belgian graphic designers, hosted by Gerard Herman & Dylan Belgrado. Gerard Herman is an artist based in Antwerp who creates installations, animation films, soundscapes and printed matter. Phantom Radio is a nomadic radio station by Ine Meganck and Valentijn Goethals, originally conceived in collaboration with Paul Elliman as an unconventional space for students, designers, musicians and artists to parasitize the airwaves together. Ine Meganck is a graphic designer and Valentijn Goethals is an artist and artistic director of Kunsthal Gent.
Participating designers: Atelier Brenda, atelier Haegeman Temmerman, Paul Boudens, Geoffrey Brusatto, Goda Budvytytė, Michaël Bussaer & Jef Cuypers, Ines Cox, D-E-A-L, Sara De Bondt, Manuela Dechamps Otamendi, Luc Derycke, Thomas Desmet, Jan & Randoald, Mads Freund Brunse, Loraine Furter, Tom Hautekiet, Ward Heirwegh, Will Holder, Oliver Ibsen, Alexis Jacob, Inge Ketelers, Joris Kritis, Roxanne Maillet, Ine Meganck & Chloé D’hauwe, Julie Peeters, Josse Pyl, Bas Rogiers, Ronny & Johny, ruttens-wille, Amina Saâdi, Specht Studio, Triangle Books, Caroline Wolewinski
Teaching typography (Graphic Design, English BA1 and BA3) at the Ryal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Very happy to announce that I am now teaching typography (Graphic Design, English BA1 and BA3) at the @royalacademyantwerp Antwerp, Belgium. It is one of the oldest of its kind in Europe (founded in 1663). I graduated here in 2004 so it feels a bit like coming home. @ines_cox taught here for the last 5 years and I feel very honored to take this position. ♡ Looking forward to the future along the side of @ine.meganck and with the help of @basrogiers ! Follow us at @graphicdesignantwerp !
Ink Village in Nancy (France) • September 5 - October 18, 2019
Ink Village exhibition at Galerie My Monkey in Nancy, France!
September 5 - October 18, 2019
🇫🇷 Le festival L’enfer is a new opportunity to explore the world of micro-publishing and hand-made publishing. This year the My Monkey Gallery has invited Corners, a design/print studio in Seoul, South Korea since 2012.
The group exhibition entitled Ink Village was initiated by Corners for the first time in February 2019 in Seoul. For this second edition, 22 illustrators, photographers and designers were invited to design posters in A2 format. Posters were all risoprinted by Corners.
Ink Village proposes to widen the field of exploration of this singular medium (risoprint) while proving once again its capacity to surprise by its specific rendering of the colors, the vibration, the depth and the unexpected combinations where it allows. Ink village gives us a glimpse of the Korean scene with the pieces of: Artist Proof, Chony Park, Dahye Jeong, Hezin O, Jaemin Lee, Moonsick Gang, Woochul Jang, Yeji Yun. It is also an opportunity to (re) discover many international artists: Alexis Mark, Bráulio Amado, Folder Studio, Gilles de Brock, Jesjit Gill, Koen Taselaar, O.OO, Regular Training, Risotto Studio, Sarah Boris, Son Ni, Specht Studio, Studio Bergini, Team Thursday.
Interview up on It's Nice That – “My creativity is sparked by music and architecture”
It’s Nice That interviewed me. Read it here.
New intern Nanna Sofie Reseke
Welcome Nanna! Looking forward to work with this talented student!
Her work: https://nannareseke.tumblr.com/
Not A Muse, book
My warmest praise to @notamuse.de for making this amazing book, published by @niggli_verlag. Not A Muse is an ongoing project investigating the visibility of women graphic designers. It’s a presentation of graphic works by 54 female designers working in Europe today, completed by interviews on graphic design, work life and feminism. The Belgian contribution is exquisite, with @bureaugrusenmeyer, myself, @ines_cox and @__bbbrrreeennndddaaa__. Essential reading!
Illustration for Ace & Tate shop in Bruges
Ace & Tate asked me to design a mural for their latest shop in Bruges. I got inspired by the house facades in the city. Mural was painted by Kymo One. Designed in 2019.
Paths (non-vector)
Giving a public lecture at Otis College for Art and Design end this month — see you soon, Los Angeles 👋🏻!
