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