I’m Leon, a graphic designer living in Frankfurt, specialising in printed matter. I mainly work on projects in the fields of art, culture, and science.
‘Graphic design’ can mean vastly different things: from a mere service to an art form in its own right. None of these approaches is better or worse than the other. Rather, it’s always a question of what the respective material calls for and how you relate to it.
At its core, graphic design is a craft. And as with any craft, it can be used to ‘solve problems’. But it can also be used to point out problems, to interrogate and debate them. Form can work with or against content, but it cannot be neutral. To design means to interpret, to lend your voice to something.
To work from an attentive attitude, to develop ideas that take their creators, curators and addressees seriously, that are thoughtful and ideally even affecting—that’s how I would describe my ideal of graphic design.
‘Gramsci once famously noted that the future should be approached with “an optimism of the heart, and a pessimism of the mind”. I notice something similar in Leon’s practice—working and thinking with utopia in the heart, and dystopia on the mind.’
Danny van den Dungen, Experimental Jetset