Sagmeister & Walsh "SS13 Aizone Campaign" - Brittnee Covich

Through research of hand crafted typography, I looked into the specific campaign that Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh worked on for the 2013 SS Aizone campaign. Sagmeister & Walsh have been directing campaigns for Aizone, a Beirut based luxury department store, for the past 3 years. They're aim this year was "Taking the vibrant nature of the brand and presenting it in campaigns that are printed in newspapers, magazines, and billboards throughout Lebanon." The SS13 campaign is a collection of hand-made typographic designs that are all formed through a crucial number of process - a combination of both physical and digital.

On the Sagmeister & Walsh site, they explain that they were inspired by the Holi Festival of Color, which is a celebration in India that takes place every year in celebration of Spring. This being said, they incorporated bright colours into the brands advertising as it had always been pitched as a black and white monotone campaign. 

The first design was heavily influenced from the colour festival, where they decided to create the typographic forms from bright blue powder to form a catchy and fun design. The process of design was to make a typographic stencil of the words "be bold", dust the powder over the top to get the correct result, and then photograph a model to combine into the image and manipulate them together to get a convincing image.

Sagmeister & Walsh. SS13 Aizone campaign. 2012 

For the campaign targeting men, they introduced the help of a light painting artist from Twin Cities Brightest to create the calligraphy that read "there is only now", with an LED light, which was then manipulated and transferred digitally through design software. 

Sagmeister & Walsh. SS13 Aizone campaign. 2012 

The last design they made consisted of a large typographic slogan reading "go big", made entirely out of hair. Stefan and Jessica made the giant typographic work physically, which was the most demanding part of the process as its true to scale compared to the model in the advert. Both the model and the typography was involved in the one shot so there was less need for much post-production manipulation unlike the previous two. 

Sagmeister & Walsh. SS13 Aizone campaign. 2012

This campaign really made me question how much we rely on commuter generate typographic forms. Yet I think that hand-crafted typography is becoming more and more apparent in contemporary graphic design at the moment. I don't know if it is because design software is becoming more accessible to everyone so therefore isn't receiving the same effect from commissioners as it once was, or if designers are just more willing to experiment and test their creativity single-handedly. Either way i think handmade type is great. And as Jessica Walsh says, "A computer is a great design tool. But its not always the right one."

Aizone Behind The Scenes SS13 from Sagmeister & Walsh on Vimeo.

This video gives an inside look as to how the processes eventuated and how everything came together for the shoots.


Another hand-crafted typographic artist I found that I found interesting to look at was Hannah Rhodes. Her project "Low Budget Ink" is A triptych of hand-crafted typography, created from cheap, unorthodox materials for the 2010 D&AD Student Awards. Read about it and see the posters here.

Designers Include:
Art Direction, Design - Sagmeister & Walsh 
Creative Director - Stefan Sagmeister
Art Director / Designer - Jessica Walsh
Photography - Henry Hargreaves 
Production - Group Theory / Ben Nabors 
Creative Retouching - Erik Johansson 
Hair Stylist - Gregory Alan Light Painting 
Artist - Dana Maltby 
Makeup - Anastasia Durasova 
Stylist - Don Sumada BTS 

Date Found: 5 April 2013

Reference Links:
Aizone Behind The Scenes SS13 (video)

Aizone

Aizone SS13 - Sagmeister & Walsh - News

Twin Cities Brightest (collaborator)