Semi-Per­ma­nent, the exclu­sive inclu­sive dig­i­tal sym­po­sium returns to Welling­ton on Novem­ber 17th.  The Embassy The­atre plays host to speak­ers from around the globe shar­ing their per­son­al expe­ri­ences, insights and exper­tise in the design, ani­ma­tion, adver­tis­ing, graph­ic and illus­tra­tion worlds.

It’s great for stu­dents of design, fans of design and peo­ple who just want to expand their mind a lit­tle more.

We’ve got a dou­ble pass to give away! And we got a chance to ask a few ques­tions of one of this year’s speak­ers, Ari­ane Spanier — a Berlin graph­ic design­er and art direc­tor mak­ing waves in the indus­try.

The series of images cre­at­ed for “The big draw berlin’ plays with depth, colour and time. Did you have a brief for that and how did you begin?


The brief wasn’t real­ly about that but the theme of that edi­tion of the draw­ing event was “Draw­ing space“, which aimed at includ­ing a few more space-relat­ed projects or work­shops in the fes­ti­val. It is a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry event, that wants to bring “every­one“ back to the basic activ­i­ty of draw­ing, as we all did, when we were kids.

At the begin­ning I want­ed to cre­ate some­thing dimen­sion­al and what could be more lame to use a draw­ing for a draw­ing event? so I turned to draw­ing mate­r­i­al — col­or pen­cils, that while stand­ing and shot from above pro­vide a fair­ly inter­est­ing per­spec­tive. lat­er the idea for a lit­tle stop motion ani­ma­tion took over which in the same time, cre­at­ed a series of posters for the pro­mo­tion. so while work­ing on one set we could cre­ate sev­er­al images, an ani­ma­tion and it all refers to the act of draw­ing which uses pen­cils that need to be sharp­ened to con­tin­ue to draw.

Peak Alpha­bet is anoth­er well known work of yours. It feels incred­i­bly organ­ic & affect­ed by time. What was your process cre­at­ing it?

Yes the organ­ic feel about it is very well intend­ed, because it was cre­at­ed entire­ly for an on-screen app — “Notegra­phy“ that allows the users to shape their writ­ings into a designed note they can pub­lish on social medias. Much screen con­tent is extreme­ly flat and two dimen­sion­al, vec­tor graph­ics that are cre­at­ed on and for a screen. I had a com­plete­ly open brief and imme­di­ate­ly felt I want­ed to do some­thing that plays with that flat per­cep­tion of stuff on screens, some­thing that looks real and grows towards you, almost leaves the flat­ness and ris­es up. I played around with fer­roflu­id first, a sim­i­lar thing to the mag­net­ic paint, but its much hard­er to con­trol because it’s basi­cal­ly an oil. It also pro­duces the lit­tle spikes through tiny iron fil­ings in it, but it was too flu­id. But with that paint it was pos­si­ble to cre­ate any shape I want­ed and as soon as I put a mag­net under these lit­tle moun­tains arose. sim­ple, fas­ci­nat­ing and effec­tive.

For your ani­ma­tions for FUKt have you enjoyed apply­ing your process to con­stant move­ment & sound? Is ani­ma­tion some­thing you are explor­ing more?

FUKT Mag­a­zine # 14 Teas­er from Ari­ane Spanier on Vimeo.

I love ani­ma­tions and if pos­si­ble I try to imple­ment them into a con­cept. But since I am doing a lot of print work, they always come up on the side, as these lit­tle extras, that are usu­al­ly real fun to do but weren’t request­ed in the first place by clients and there­fore often not bud­get­ed prop­er­ly. But more and more ani­mat­ed con­tent will be part of our screen real­i­ty, so that’ll change even more and there is more to come in the future.

What is inspir­ing your work at the moment?
I can nev­er pin point inspi­ra­tion real­ly. Some­times I think one can’t even ask that ques­tion, nor answer it. Because inspir­ing can be every­thing around us, the yel­low­ing leaves out­side my win­dow, a book I have read, a con­cert I’ve seen or an ener­gy I felt. but where inspi­ra­tion hap­pens, inside of each one of us, some­thing hap­pens that’s just hard to explain. and some­thing that I drew inspi­ra­tion from might not talk to some­one else at all. Because often there are no direct con­nec­tions made, it all gets mixed up, put some per­son­al taste and per­son­al inter­est and per­son­al his­to­ry to it and there you go.

Is there a design trend you are look­ing for­ward to say­ing good­bye to?
Haha, i am look­ing for­ward to an end of type that’s been put on a scan­ner and gets a wavy form by pulling it away while it gets scanned, for sure. Frames, inside frames inside frames inside frames too.

Emp­ty brain­less rep­e­ti­tion of looks in gen­er­al. But we all are part of our time and we get stuffed with visu­als con­tin­u­ous­ly from all sides, so it’s a pret­ty hard fight to avoid these “ideas“ that uncon­scious­ly pop up, that feel so cozy — sim­ply because you have seen it some­where and for­got­ten about it.

But i also love the web­site trendlist.org, you always are half scared or ashamed when you rec­og­nize some­thing of that stuff or appear on it your­self. I love the cat­e­go­riz­ing and expos­ing. It’s a lit­tle bit of a design voy­erism. It might invite cer­tain peo­ple to check out what to do next though, but the ambiva­lence about this web­site I real­ly like.

What piece of advice would you give to a young cre­ative start­ing out on their own in 2015?
When start­ing out on your own, I don’t have the super smart advice but do all the works you can, whether it’s for Granny or good friends or the lit­tle flower store down the street and/or not so well paid. All is valu­able expe­ri­ence and fills a port­fo­lio and will attract more peo­ple inter­est­ed in your work. But only do the work the way you like / enjoy it and can be proud of. Also the bad work will attract future clients. there are too many peo­ple out there lik­ing bad work and you end up doing things you don’t want to do.

OR wait a moment with start­ing out alone and col­lect some expe­ri­ence at good design stu­dios whose work you are a fan of. take a course in econ­o­my or get as many advice on how to built up your own stu­dio 🙂 then do it any­way the way you want it after.

We’ve got a DOUBLE PASS  to Semi-Per­ma­nent Welling­ton to give away. Just com­ment here with the name of a speak­er join­ing Ari­ane Spanier at this year’s event before noon on the the 12th of Novem­ber. We’ll announce the win­ner on Fri­day the 13th mak­ing it a lucky day for one per­son.

(For a sec­ond chance to enter keep an eye on our Twit­ter feed, as we are all about dou­ble entries)
UPDATE — fol­low and reply to our twit­ter ques­tion for a sec­ond chance to win that pret­ty amaz­ing dou­ble pass to Semi-Per­ma­nent

UPDATE — we have a win­ner it’s Mitch who has been emailed and if we don’t hear from her by mid­night fri­day we’ll run that ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor again