[ ... ] [ Share Screen, book, 2020. Share Screen is the graduation catalogue of my former graphic design department, designed and authored together with Franziska Froebe. With this publication, we aimed to show the circumstances that this years' graduates faced. Spending most of their graduation semester at home because of a lockdown, their work life and private life became increasingly mixed up, and the main mode of connection with professors and fellow students was videocall after videocall. In a long photoseries we capture both the mixture of the private and the academic, as well as the unsettling connection between students and professors via videocalls, which we found very apparent in the sight of a deserted webcam: showing merely an empty personal space wherejust a second before a serious professional conversation took place. We chose to document the graduation works through the webcam as well, to so present them to the public as we had been looking at each other's work for most of the months as well: via the sharing of screens. — My part in this project consisted of concept development; developing the subjects of the photographs we wished to get from our classmates; the selection, layout and editing of the photo's; and coverdesign. ]
[ ... ] [ Domesticated, sculptures, 2018. An exploration of the mountain as part of our visual culture. ]
[ ... ] [ Shorts, book, 2018. The American journalist and writer Graham Meyer wrote four short pieces on shorthand, private language, and artificial language. I was struck by the beauty of both the written pieces and the phenomenon of shorthand itself. I decided to take the role of stenographer, try to retype the text as fast as I could, and let the unavoidable mistakes coming about from this, and their corrections, determine the form of the pages. A strategy I felt had to be performed on a typewriter, being a medium doesn't have a command-Z key. ]
[ ... ] [ Computer Vision, Adjustable Eyes Pt. 2, drawings and digital etches, 2020. An exploration of what the world might look like when seen through a being with the eyes of a colorist, the rigid binary logic of an algorhytm and the ruthless determination of a machine. A world seen in merely the terms of outline and fill, and coloured in accordingly. ]
[ ... ] [ Untitled, machine/typography, 2018. This project started with me wanting to find out if I could hack the wire of a laserpinter and so interfere with the signal between computer and printer, I discovered that this is not possible, in the process though I noted that daylight has an influence the printing process, and thus I took the printer apart and beamed into to it with an old projector, and so 'drew' on the paper with the beam while it was being printed, creating blobs, shapes and forms. ]
[ ... ] [ "...and all they feared was for the sky to fall.", book/sculpture, 2019. A research into the formal structure of the objects and gestures that mandkind uses to shield itself from things falling from the sky. ]
[ ... ] [ Soms ik voel mij zombie, book, 2021. Bookdesign for soms ik voel mij zombie, a monologue written by Pelumi Adejumo. She asked me to remove all punctuation and capitals from the text, and wanted a design that breathed both visual poetry as well as did justice to the way the text was recited by the actor who did a performance of the text. I came up with a loose system of text alignement based on the invisible punctuation, and hand-aligned the entire text based on a combination of that system and the recital. For the cover, Pelumi coined the idea of an illustration of a clay sculpture. I felt that the actual sculpture would resonate even more with the formal quality of visual poetry and the way that I ‘sculpted’ the text, and spread the photo as well as the title over the back as well as the front of the book. To so give the feeling of opening joy’s (the first person character in the text) head. ]
[ ... ] [ Skulking, typeface, 2019. ]
[ ... ] [ Finnegans Wake as a Lyrical Score, book, 2019. Redesign of James Joyce's famous book, while reading it struck me that the text started to live more for me when I recited it as if a spoken-word piece or hiphop lyric. Taking this notion as a starting point, I designed the text in such a way that every sentence ends with a visible breathing space. And gave sentences that I would speak in exclamation, wonder, or mumbles, all their own distinct style. ]
[ ... ] [ Traces, book, 2018. ]
[ ... ] [ Hyperlinked, web-extension, 2018. A web-extension that draws a thin black line between all the hyperlinks on a webpage, while hiding all original content from sight. The links (detectable as the points where a lot of lines intersect) still function, and so the extension enables a new browsing experience, one where not the content, but the underlying structure of the internet, is what is browsed through. ]
[ ... ] [ Oa iee, system, 2018. Inspired by shorthand writing, I wanted to come up with a way to record everything going on around me, on a silkscreen. I'm a horrible fast-writer, so had to come up with something else, and thus invented a way of imprinting silkscreens with the light of a computer-monitor: removing the sheet and external lightsource from the process, and instead putting an external monitor upside-down on the silkscreen, hooking up my laptop tot the monitor, and so enabling myself to, while typing, or even recoriding a video with my webcam, directly imprinting this onto the screen. ]
[ ... ] [ Sound As A Muscle, book, 2021. A book made with- and written by, Pelumi Adejumo. ]
[ ... ] [ Letterthings, type-design/posters, 2018. Letters and posters created for a hypothetical exhibition of the work Jaap Kroneman. In his work, I found a recurring gesture of removing the one trait that makes a certain object what it is, and by doing so setting the object in a different light. Taking this as inspiration, I sprayed fixative on reams of duck tape, making them non-sticky and so enabling me to drape them into letterforms, doing so I made the alphabet and let this typeface be the posters. ]
[ ... ] [In Parenthesis, poster, 2017. A poster designed for‐ and displayed on, an annual poster contest held by the 3second-gallery in The Hague. This years theme was 'Hokjesdenken': the mode of thought that labels and categorizes people into mutually exclusive groups (sometimes translated as 'pigeonholing'). The theme had me thinking about how we treat opinions contrary of our own: In our society, every statement made seems to lead to counter-statements and relativizations, rather then consideration. Could this cause an inflation of the actual value of an opinion? In the clamour of statements and counter-statements, it seems to become more and more common to shout out: "Well, but that is only your opinion" without actually and seriously considering someone's viewpoint or relation to a topic. In such an environment of public debate, sadly, everything become relative. Up to a point where even setting yourself on fire won't be enough to be taken seriously.]
[ Share Screen, book/editorial, 2020. Domesticated, sculptures, 2018. Shorts, book/typography, 2018. Computer Vision, Adjustable Eyes Pt. 2, drawings and digital etches, 2020. Untitled I, system/typography, 2018. The Book of Damocles, sculpture/book, 2019. Soms ik voel mij zombie, book/typography, 2021. Skulking, typeface, 2019. Finnegans Wake as a Lyrical Score, book/typography, 2019. Hyperlinked, web-extension, 2018. Traces, book/editorial, 2018. Oa iee, system, 2018. Sound As A Muscle, book/typography, 2021. Untitled II, posters/type-design, 2018. In Parenthesis, poster, 2017. ]
[ Joost Vullings is a graphic designer based in Arnhem. Be welcome to get in touch for commissions, collaborations, or anything else via: moc.sgnilluvtsooj@ofni or www.instagram.com/joost_.joost.
I was educated at ArtEZ in Arnhem (BA Graphic Design), ZhdK in Zurich (BA Fine Art, Minor) and St. Joost in Breda (pre-education Art & Design), and co-founded 530type, a student type initiative, collective and playground.
In 2020, I wrote A design without referents, an essay on the intensity and intrusiveness of visual culture, the effects this may have on the viewers/receivers of visual messages, and how agrammatical design can be an alternative for this: creating a slower, less commercially informed and more kind information environment. If interested, both the full text as well as the preface in Dutch are available online. ]