Parallel-Parallel is a gallery of works by graphic designers that
a) have been postponed indefinitely,
b) will never be realized or published,
c) were published for an event that will never take place because of this damn virus.

We believe that graphic design plays with potential realities and with this current crisis we want to see what has been left, on pause, in your hands.

If you are a graphic designer and have been working on a project that fits this description please reach out to us via:
email@parallel-parallel.com

We are looking forward to hearing from you,
your fellow designers,
Dorothee Dähler & Yeliz Secerli

PS: This website is programmed by Quentin Creuzet!

Parallel-Parallel is a gallery of works by graphic designers that
a) have been postponed indefinitely,
b) will never be realized or published,
c) were published for an event that will never take place because of this damn virus.

We believe that graphic design plays with potential realities and with this current crisis we want to see what has been left, on pause, in your hands.

If you are a graphic designer and have been working on a project that fits this description please reach out to us via:
email@parallel-parallel.com

We are looking forward to hearing from you,
your fellow designers,
Dorothee Dähler & Yeliz Secerli

PS: This website is programmed by Quentin Creuzet!

Weltformat Magazine

Weltformat is an annual graphic design festival which takes place in Lucerne (CH). It was one of the rare events that were realized despite the virus in 2020. The newly launched Welformat magazine offers background information, this year’s theme was “Not (Yet) Canceled.” Sound familiar? The essays and projects were manifested, initiated and kick-started because of the pandemic. Read thoroughly, flip slowly, and enjoy a surprise parallel appearance in the end.
Buy it here

Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith

We finally have our reward (thank you COVID19!) with Intimations, a collection of essays that tells us exactly what Zadie Smith has been thinking all this time! She walks us through her personal experience of the pandemic. She writes as a coping mechanism, as a place to hide. She looks into herself, then her people, and the people outside. She writes about the city she lives, loves and leaves (New York), and the rotten roots of the country and its ongoing bad behavior. When you finish it, you feel like you’ve undergone heart surgery; the heart aches but you’ve been given a second chance to live life with a new set of priorities.
Buy it here

What The Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us

In this article, Orhan Pamuk demonstrates the remarkably consistent ways in which humans throughout history have responded to fear. After extensive research for his new novel, Pamuk takes us on a journey through many of the most enjoyable pandemics in history; both fictional and true.
Read it here

What Are Parallel Universes?

In this unusual interview, Fred Alan Wolf, quantum physics specialist explains the concept of parallel universes so that even the interviewer begins to understand it! Wolf says that quantum physics explains many facts of physical life. Yet it is still a mystery to most experts which isn’t very reassuring. Perhaps they have it all figured out in another universe.
Read it here

Parallel Cards by Ryan Gander & Europa

Ryan Gander isn’t just the joker in the pack.
Look behind the poker-faced humor of these parallel cards (playing cards where both sides are the front) and you realize there is more depth to the concept. His perception of playing cards has taken on a journey of its own since he was a child and the aesthetics of their usage within this deck opens up a universe of new possibilities.
Get them here

The Third Policeman

In this essay, Ted Gioia explores (and delights in!) The Third Policeman—a novel by Flann O’Brien (the pen name of Irish author Brian O’Nolan). This surrealist crime novel, now regarded as a literary classic, remained unpublished until 1967, one year after his death (nobody appears to have made a crime novel out of this fact!) “A book that starts out with overtones of Crime and Punishment, says Giola, “soon takes on a flavor more akin to Alice in Wonderland.” Incidentally, you’ll be hard pushed to find a more enjoyable book cover design!
More here

Kuki Shūzō : Parallel Lines

A joy-read on Iki (粋/いき), a Japanese aesthetical concept which translates roughly as chic or stylish, but means so much more. The word was used in 19th-century Japan to define the endless charm of the geisha. Design is crucial for the manifestation of iki. These lines on parallel lines are drawn from the fourth chapter of Kuki Shūzō’s 1930 book Reflections on Japanese Taste —The Structure of iki (Tokyo: IwanamiShoten, 1930), brought to you by the Serving Library.
Download here

Weltformat Magazine

Weltformat is an annual graphic design festival which takes place in Lucerne (CH). It was one of the rare events that were realized despite the virus in 2020. The newly launched Welformat magazine offers background information, this year’s theme was “Not (Yet) Canceled.” Sound familiar? The essays and projects were manifested, initiated and kick-started because of the pandemic. Read thoroughly, flip slowly, and enjoy a surprise parallel appearance in the end.
Buy it here

Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith

We finally have our reward (thank you COVID19!) with Intimations, a collection of essays that tells us exactly what Zadie Smith has been thinking all this time! She walks us through her personal experience of the pandemic. She writes as a coping mechanism, as a place to hide. She looks into herself, then her people, and the people outside. She writes about the city she lives, loves and leaves (New York), and the rotten roots of the country and its ongoing bad behavior. When you finish it, you feel like you’ve undergone heart surgery; the heart aches but you’ve been given a second chance to live life with a new set of priorities.
Buy it here

What The Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us

In this article, Orhan Pamuk demonstrates the remarkably consistent ways in which humans throughout history have responded to fear. After extensive research for his new novel, Pamuk takes us on a journey through many of the most enjoyable pandemics in history; both fictional and true.
Read it here

What Are Parallel Universes?

In this unusual interview, Fred Alan Wolf, quantum physics specialist explains the concept of parallel universes so that even the interviewer begins to understand it! Wolf says that quantum physics explains many facts of physical life. Yet it is still a mystery to most experts which isn’t very reassuring. Perhaps they have it all figured out in another universe.
Read it here

Parallel Cards by Ryan Gander & Europa

Ryan Gander isn’t just the joker in the pack.
Look behind the poker-faced humor of these parallel cards (playing cards where both sides are the front) and you realize there is more depth to the concept. His perception of playing cards has taken on a journey of its own since he was a child and the aesthetics of their usage within this deck opens up a universe of new possibilities.
Get them here

The Third Policeman

In this essay, Ted Gioia explores (and delights in!) The Third Policeman—a novel by Flann O’Brien (the pen name of Irish author Brian O’Nolan). This surrealist crime novel, now regarded as a literary classic, remained unpublished until 1967, one year after his death (nobody appears to have made a crime novel out of this fact!) “A book that starts out with overtones of Crime and Punishment, says Giola, “soon takes on a flavor more akin to Alice in Wonderland.” Incidentally, you’ll be hard pushed to find a more enjoyable book cover design!
More here

Kuki Shūzō : Parallel Lines

A joy-read on Iki (粋/いき), a Japanese aesthetical concept which translates roughly as chic or stylish, but means so much more. The word was used in 19th-century Japan to define the endless charm of the geisha. Design is crucial for the manifestation of iki. These lines on parallel lines are drawn from the fourth chapter of Kuki Shūzō’s 1930 book Reflections on Japanese Taste —The Structure of iki (Tokyo: IwanamiShoten, 1930), brought to you by the Serving Library.
Download here

Parallel-Parallel
Opening : June 3rd, 18:30pm at The ÖFF (St. Jakobstrasse 54)
Lecture: June 4th, 16:00
OffShore Studio’s Isabel Seiffert, Turbo’s Mothanna Hussein and Stoecklin & Wilson’s Melina Wilson will be giving presentations about their ‘ghost’ works. The lectures will be presented in English.
Ortolan: June 11th,16:00
Kaj Lehmann and Nicolas Schaltegger will run «Ortolan», a pop-up bar with special cocktails

After two years of collecting projects, and showcasing them online, Parallel-Parallel became an in person exhibition. By showing a selection of works from the website, some produced and some not (drawn directly on the wall) we aimed to examine the different states of the graphic design practice, in other words, the process of materialization of the design object. How do we talk about and present the ‘ghost’ works that never left our computers or that remained in our minds?

Read more
We are grateful for everyone who came to visit, who gave us their incredible space (Matthias Wyler and André Rothfuchs from Studio Sirup), who helped us install and draw (Coline Houtot), who wrote our introduction text (Andrea Salerno), who made ghost stickers for us (Experimental Jetset), who recorded our voice labels (Rhona Mühlebach), who shared so candidly and gracefully their ghost projects (Isabel Seifert, Melina Wilson), who made fantastic cocktails for our Finissage (Kaj Lehmann, Nicolas Schaltegger), while (@_thisislookah, @alpha_mi_, Flo Olomski) played the best music, who hosted us in their flat (Raphael Schoen), and of course all the designers who have been part of Parallel-Parallel. Looking forward to the parallel futures. 👻
DARCH

In early 2020 we’ve designed the communication material for “Mittelbau Forum” an event dedicated to the associates of ETH Zurichs Architectural Department (DArch). Unfortunately the event was first postponed and later on, due Covid-19, canceled.

Designer(s):
DNA (Dominik Sieber, Nicolas Schaltegger), Zürich (CH)
Tumultingent8
Tumultingent8

Poster for the Art Festival “Tumultingent8” in Ghent. Translated as “Uproar in Ghent”. Each year the festival selects a series of ghent-based cultural institutes to curate the program of the festival. Combining the cultural scene of Ghent in one chaotic, but inspiring week around the library of Ghent.

Designer(s):
Corbin Mahieu, Ghent (BE)
Client:
Urgent.fm, Ghent (BE)
Julian Bittiner

Last spring, to accompany the launch of a book I designed with the artist Sam Contis, we created a set of two promotional newsprint posters. On the front of each poster was the same enlarged image from the book, a photograph by iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange taken in Fallen Leaf Lake, California, whose work the book radically reexamines. On the back of each poster are two different sets of images reproduced proportionally and in the same sequence as in the book, with a set of corresponding notes. One set of images comes from the first half of the book, the second set from the second half, so together all of the images are represented.

The posters were distributed at the first book launch at Mast Books in New York and a lecture at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, before the pandemic prevented any more in-person events. As a result Sam and I still have several hundred copies sitting in boxes in our studios, waiting to be distributed…

Designer(s):
Julian Bittiner, New York (US)
Client:
Sam Contis, Berkeley (US)
Andrew Kopietz
Andrew Kopietz

This was supposed to be a foldable 11 x 17” (2-sided) program guide/mailer/poster for Sidewalk Detroit. It focused on an annual celebration of art, music, and spatial equity in Detroit’s Eliza Howell Park. In hindsight, it was a lot of fun to do. The squiggly line drawings were based on the types of birds 🐦 (yellow finches) and pinkish 🌸 flora + fauna that you would see scattered throughout the park during the Spring/Summer. The main illustration, titles, and sub-titles were all hand-lettered. Colors were all about summer (yellow for sun, green for a large grassy park). This event’s programming eventually transitioned online. It became a series of short-term mobile/digital performances. New artists would produce works every few weeks and then hop online to have a virtual chat with Sidewalk Detroit’s executive director to discuss their creative practices, do live (remote) Yoga with Detroit residents, etc.

Designer(s):
Good Done Daily, Detroit (US)
Client:
Sidewalk Detroit, Detroit (US)
Anais
Anais

This visual announced the event of the two audio pieces “Bodies of Water” and “Threnodie für den Lockdown” by Anais Orr and Demian Jakob. The event could not take place because the Swiss government changed the Corona regulations a few days before the show.

Designer(s):
Salzmann Gertsch, Bern (CH)
Client:
Anais Orr and Demian Jakob, Zurich (CH)
Eusebes & Makhimos
Eusebes & Makhimos

Eusebes & Makhimos is a septet jazzband from Paris. Their music finds its roots in classical jazz and grows through diverse genres such as rock, film score and progressive music. I started working with the band in 2017 by designing their first album cover with Pierre-Henri Terrade. Last year, they released their second album called “Far Away From the Way.” I designed these posters for a series of gigs that were cancelled due to covid restrictions. Their purpose was to convey the epic and dreamlike universe of their music. They will be used when concerts become a thing again - hopefully soon!

Designer(s):
Cédric Houssen, Paris, Montreuil (FR)
Client:
Eusebes & Makhimos, Paris (FR)
Verhülltes entdecken
Verhülltes entdecken
Verhülltes entdecken

The poster and flyer were designed for the festival ‘Verhülltes entdecken!’ by the Neukölln district office in Belin. Like other events, the festival has been postponed due to a lock-down in Germany and has yet to be held.

Designer(s):
Jihee Lee, Hamburg (DE), Seoul (KR)
Client:
Neukölln district office in Belin, Berlin (DE)
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM

Weefsel (Tissue) was one of those ‘file under meaningful’ projects. It was a publication for Dutch artist, Ine Boermans, who started writing a few years ago because of health challenges. Her personal essays about her relation to art, making art, and (art) philosophy, mainly got published in online magazines and occasionally in print. Weefsel would be her first independent publication and was made possible by The Mondriaan Fund. (a national fund for the arts) It would merge her writing into one personal, new super-essay on art and would appear as a one-off free magazine.

Read more

This low budget endeavour, pushed us towards mass-printing solutions—a full color A4 brochure on generic recycled paper—which shifted all the design-weight onto graphic design choices. As always, an extensive typography exploration is followed by lay-out and color experiments. Feeling the energy of her preliminary essay made it a playful and intuitive process leading quickly to the first proofs. [Img. 1, 2, 3] These focused on visually expressing a layered and personal story, rather than being distracting.

When covid hit the low-lands and an ‘intelligent’ lock-down was installed, a digital (pdf) version became an additional objective. The design was now altered so that it would work both in print, (in its original A4 size) and on screens. (by reducing the width only) [Img. 4, 5].

The family stay-home situation and Boermans’ low energy prevented her from giving the essay the desired attention. After much consideration, she felt her energy should be redirected into something new and that it was best to leave the essay in the past. She cancelled any further development of the project in May.

Her bold decision came at a time when, unsurprisingly, I had also entered a personal and professional existential phase. Working on my online archive publication now felt irrelevant, just like my oeuvre. I admired Ine’s change of direction, but I was disappointed that this exciting and artistically driven project had been canceled. When the BLM movement gained huge global momentum at the end of May, I began to re-appropriate the cancelled design to publicise my own roaring feelings. I am not a fan of emo-share on social media, yet the situation had gotten so real on an elusive personal and global level, that I was momentarily tempted to share my struggles in relation to the creative field’s discomfort. I did not go through with it. [Img. 6]

In the end it made its way into the social sphere. I copied the graphic layers into the instagram announcement for the first radioshow on www.operator-radio.com since lockdown ‘Omnipotence of Wishes, four.’ For each episode I created an image that is based on a visual project I am currently working on; a new version, a glitch, stage or rework or like this case, a discard. [Img. 7, 8]

Ine Boermans recently published her first successful novel and it is yielding amazing reviews. All ended well in the end.

Designer(s):
Nicole Martens, Rotterdam (NL)
Client:
Ine Boermans
Parallel-Parallel
Opening : June 3rd, 18:30pm at The ÖFF (St. Jakobstrasse 54)
Lecture: June 4th, 16:00
OffShore Studio’s Isabel Seiffert, Turbo’s Mothanna Hussein and Stoecklin & Wilson’s Melina Wilson will be giving presentations about their ‘ghost’ works. The lectures will be presented in English.
Ortolan: June 11th,16:00
Kaj Lehmann and Nicolas Schaltegger will run «Ortolan», a pop-up bar with special cocktails

After two years of collecting projects, and showcasing them online, Parallel-Parallel became an in person exhibition. By showing a selection of works from the website, some produced and some not (drawn directly on the wall) we aimed to examine the different states of the graphic design practice, in other words, the process of materialization of the design object. How do we talk about and present the ‘ghost’ works that never left our computers or that remained in our minds?

Read more
We are grateful for everyone who came to visit, who gave us their incredible space (Matthias Wyler and André Rothfuchs from Studio Sirup), who helped us install and draw (Coline Houtot), who wrote our introduction text (Andrea Salerno), who made ghost stickers for us (Experimental Jetset), who recorded our voice labels (Rhona Mühlebach), who shared so candidly and gracefully their ghost projects (Isabel Seifert, Melina Wilson), who made fantastic cocktails for our Finissage (Kaj Lehmann, Nicolas Schaltegger), while (@_thisislookah, @alpha_mi_, Flo Olomski) played the best music, who hosted us in their flat (Raphael Schoen), and of course all the designers who have been part of Parallel-Parallel. Looking forward to the parallel futures. 👻
DARCH

In early 2020 we’ve designed the communication material for “Mittelbau Forum” an event dedicated to the associates of ETH Zurichs Architectural Department (DArch). Unfortunately the event was first postponed and later on, due Covid-19, canceled.

Designer(s):
DNA (Dominik Sieber, Nicolas Schaltegger), Zürich (CH)
Tumultingent8
Tumultingent8

Poster for the Art Festival “Tumultingent8” in Ghent. Translated as “Uproar in Ghent”. Each year the festival selects a series of ghent-based cultural institutes to curate the program of the festival. Combining the cultural scene of Ghent in one chaotic, but inspiring week around the library of Ghent.

Designer(s):
Corbin Mahieu, Ghent (BE)
Client:
Urgent.fm, Ghent (BE)
Julian Bittiner

Last spring, to accompany the launch of a book I designed with the artist Sam Contis, we created a set of two promotional newsprint posters. On the front of each poster was the same enlarged image from the book, a photograph by iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange taken in Fallen Leaf Lake, California, whose work the book radically reexamines. On the back of each poster are two different sets of images reproduced proportionally and in the same sequence as in the book, with a set of corresponding notes. One set of images comes from the first half of the book, the second set from the second half, so together all of the images are represented.

The posters were distributed at the first book launch at Mast Books in New York and a lecture at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, before the pandemic prevented any more in-person events. As a result Sam and I still have several hundred copies sitting in boxes in our studios, waiting to be distributed…

Designer(s):
Julian Bittiner, New York (US)
Client:
Sam Contis, Berkeley (US)
Andrew Kopietz
Andrew Kopietz

This was supposed to be a foldable 11 x 17” (2-sided) program guide/mailer/poster for Sidewalk Detroit. It focused on an annual celebration of art, music, and spatial equity in Detroit’s Eliza Howell Park. In hindsight, it was a lot of fun to do. The squiggly line drawings were based on the types of birds 🐦 (yellow finches) and pinkish 🌸 flora + fauna that you would see scattered throughout the park during the Spring/Summer. The main illustration, titles, and sub-titles were all hand-lettered. Colors were all about summer (yellow for sun, green for a large grassy park). This event’s programming eventually transitioned online. It became a series of short-term mobile/digital performances. New artists would produce works every few weeks and then hop online to have a virtual chat with Sidewalk Detroit’s executive director to discuss their creative practices, do live (remote) Yoga with Detroit residents, etc.

Designer(s):
Good Done Daily, Detroit (US)
Client:
Sidewalk Detroit, Detroit (US)
Anais
Anais

This visual announced the event of the two audio pieces “Bodies of Water” and “Threnodie für den Lockdown” by Anais Orr and Demian Jakob. The event could not take place because the Swiss government changed the Corona regulations a few days before the show.

Designer(s):
Salzmann Gertsch, Bern (CH)
Client:
Anais Orr and Demian Jakob, Zurich (CH)
Eusebes & Makhimos
Eusebes & Makhimos

Eusebes & Makhimos is a septet jazzband from Paris. Their music finds its roots in classical jazz and grows through diverse genres such as rock, film score and progressive music. I started working with the band in 2017 by designing their first album cover with Pierre-Henri Terrade. Last year, they released their second album called “Far Away From the Way.” I designed these posters for a series of gigs that were cancelled due to covid restrictions. Their purpose was to convey the epic and dreamlike universe of their music. They will be used when concerts become a thing again - hopefully soon!

Designer(s):
Cédric Houssen, Paris, Montreuil (FR)
Client:
Eusebes & Makhimos, Paris (FR)
Verhülltes entdecken
Verhülltes entdecken
Verhülltes entdecken

The poster and flyer were designed for the festival ‘Verhülltes entdecken!’ by the Neukölln district office in Belin. Like other events, the festival has been postponed due to a lock-down in Germany and has yet to be held.

Designer(s):
Jihee Lee, Hamburg (DE), Seoul (KR)
Client:
Neukölln district office in Belin, Berlin (DE)
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM
NM

Weefsel (Tissue) was one of those ‘file under meaningful’ projects. It was a publication for Dutch artist, Ine Boermans, who started writing a few years ago because of health challenges. Her personal essays about her relation to art, making art, and (art) philosophy, mainly got published in online magazines and occasionally in print. Weefsel would be her first independent publication and was made possible by The Mondriaan Fund. (a national fund for the arts) It would merge her writing into one personal, new super-essay on art and would appear as a one-off free magazine.

Read more

This low budget endeavour, pushed us towards mass-printing solutions—a full color A4 brochure on generic recycled paper—which shifted all the design-weight onto graphic design choices. As always, an extensive typography exploration is followed by lay-out and color experiments. Feeling the energy of her preliminary essay made it a playful and intuitive process leading quickly to the first proofs. [Img. 1, 2, 3] These focused on visually expressing a layered and personal story, rather than being distracting.

When covid hit the low-lands and an ‘intelligent’ lock-down was installed, a digital (pdf) version became an additional objective. The design was now altered so that it would work both in print, (in its original A4 size) and on screens. (by reducing the width only) [Img. 4, 5].

The family stay-home situation and Boermans’ low energy prevented her from giving the essay the desired attention. After much consideration, she felt her energy should be redirected into something new and that it was best to leave the essay in the past. She cancelled any further development of the project in May.

Her bold decision came at a time when, unsurprisingly, I had also entered a personal and professional existential phase. Working on my online archive publication now felt irrelevant, just like my oeuvre. I admired Ine’s change of direction, but I was disappointed that this exciting and artistically driven project had been canceled. When the BLM movement gained huge global momentum at the end of May, I began to re-appropriate the cancelled design to publicise my own roaring feelings. I am not a fan of emo-share on social media, yet the situation had gotten so real on an elusive personal and global level, that I was momentarily tempted to share my struggles in relation to the creative field’s discomfort. I did not go through with it. [Img. 6]

In the end it made its way into the social sphere. I copied the graphic layers into the instagram announcement for the first radioshow on www.operator-radio.com since lockdown ‘Omnipotence of Wishes, four.’ For each episode I created an image that is based on a visual project I am currently working on; a new version, a glitch, stage or rework or like this case, a discard. [Img. 7, 8]

Ine Boermans recently published her first successful novel and it is yielding amazing reviews. All ended well in the end.

Designer(s):
Nicole Martens, Rotterdam (NL)
Client:
Ine Boermans