Parallel-Parallel

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!

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

Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith

What The Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us

What Are Parallel Universes?

Parallel Cards by Ryan Gander & Europa

The Third Policeman

Kuki Shūzō : Parallel Lines

The identity of the Cully Jazz 2020 is based on the perspective of a concert room which, ironically, is empty. The rooms at Cully Jazz were indeed deserted, after the cancellation of the festival, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The posters were printed at Lézard Graphique and hung in the streets before the pandemic reached us.

Designer(s):
Giliane Cachin, Zurich (CH)
Alice Franchetti, Geneva (CH)

Client:
Cully Jazz Festival 2020, Cully (CH)

Arts festival is for the young, for the very young, for the very very young and for grown-ups. Oh, well, for everyone! Young children have the right to experience good art. That is why 2turvenhoog has been creating spaces to research, produce and present performances and art installations for over 20 years; for the young children (0–6 years) and for the people around them.

But, after 20 years, it was time for a fresh bold daring visual language. This would be launched at the festival in April in the streets of Almere, Haarlem and Amsterdam. We formulated the following starting point as a basis for the design of the new identity: a visual language for all the elements of the many headed platform, for now and for the future, from the festival to professionals, for artists and for business partners. Fully adaptable, unambiguous, recognizable, strong, visible and cheerful. Due to the coronavirus, the festival has been postponed until the end of the year. Hopefully it will then carry on into 2021 and we can continue explore this visual language.

Designer(s):
Bureau Merkwaardig

Client:
2turvenhoog

This is the visual identity for the 15th edition of the B–Sides Festival that would have happened in mid June 2020. Although it won’t ever happen now we had a lot of fun working on it. With photography by Kim Pham and a slick typeface by Fabio Furlani!

Designer(s):
Alan Romano, Lucerne (CH)
Jaron Gyger, Bern (CH)

Client:
B–Sides Festival, Lucerne (CH)

Calibration marks, crop marks, alignment marks, dots, color bars—all of these graphics disappear when they have fulfilled their duties to create the printed objects on display at the bookstore. If you revive these elements and fold them back into space, what does the landscape unfold?

The MMCA Art Bookstore, founded in 2019, is located in the Art Zone on the first floor of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea in Seoul. We were invited at the end of 2019 to create a spatial graphic work and to collaborate on a publication. The project went smoothly. Recalling that the bookstore handled the physical prints as well as the books, we installed all of the printer’s marks into the space: on glass windows, the walls, and the floor.

Photographer Park Sungsoo documented the various printer’s marks, which, now taking on the form of re-flattened images, could be reincorporated into the publication. In other words, the marks placed in space were returned to their original homes/roles on the page. Production for the publication, however, was postponed due to the spread of COVID-19, and the entire museum has been closed tentatively for the time being.

Designer(s):
Shin Shin, Seoul (KR)

Client:
The MMCAl Art Bookstore, Seoul (KR)

Fundação Marques da Silva (FMS) is a research institution based in Porto, focusing on architectural and artistic culture. Over the years, it has been acquiring the archives of some of the most relevant Portuguese architects. FMS was about to open its doors to the city for the first time, by starting a program of exhibitions and parallel activities. The opening was scheduled for the 13th of March but has been postponed indefinitely.

Designer(s):
Ana Resende, Porto (PT)
Joana Sobral, Berlin (DE)

Client:
Fundação Marques da Silva, Porto (PT)

We are two students from the School of Design Bern Biel (SfGBB). This year is was our final year, and we had all submitted a final project. We had designed the flyers and posters, as well as the external signage and the curation for the exhibition. The opening day would have taken place on March 18th but the virus, unfortunately, prevented that. The main theme was smell, and we used the green cult fragrance tree as a key visual. Our class was very disappointed that we could not celebrate our four-year formation.

Designer(s):
Emma Leuthold, Biel (CH)
Fabian Luginbühl, Biel (CH)

Client:
Schule für Gestaltung Bern und Biel, Biel/Bern (CH)

“Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik” is a book that I was commissioned to design in late 2019. It was scheduled to be published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City on the occasion of Kenneth Frampton’s 90th birthday and retirement from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

A design direction and a printer (who produced a beautiful book dummy) were selected for the project, and all was moving smoothly forward. However, Columbia was among the first NYC schools to close/move online. Alas, our disparate locations slowed momentum, complicated communication, and ultimately the project was halted (unfortunately) indefinitely.

Designer(s):
Scott Vander Zee, New York (US)

Client:
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, New York (US)

Rude Strategies
GLOSS: The Beauty Tour of Amsterdam
We got funded to work on a publication in early 2020, we have been collaborating for a year prior and this would be our first work as a duo. Our publication was focused on studying digital beauty trends and looking at how the requirement of instagrammabilty transforms the environment around us. Based in the Netherlands, we decided to work on a location-based project situated in Amsterdam. We would develop the publication by working as observers; simply gazing, pretending to be a tourist, or pretending to be a local—depending on our moods, outfits and the role each of us decided to play on a given day.

Looking for how digital beauty campaigns translate in shiny surfaces of shop windows, we also visited European headquarters of fashion brands, such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. We are fascinated by how Instagram has the power to request the offline world to gloss up, smoothen out and hide its sharp edges. As women, we have always faced the demand of being smooth; a certain softness of our skin and our character. Gazing at shiny and smooth surfaces, we wanted to create our own world which blends multiple realities together and welcomes an outsider.

Obviously, we cannot go on tour at the moment, so we are working on adjusting our research methods and talking about taking the step to publish digitally. It is very clear that the publication we have envisioned will not be realized, simply because the environment we aimed to observe is different and will never be the same again. And so are we.

Designer(s):
Simona Koutná, Amsterdam (NL)
Karina Zavidova, Amsterdam (NL)

Client:
Self-initiated