There are a few magazines of which we never miss an issue, and since years DUMMY is definitely a “must read” in our studio. Their unique approach and views are something we deeply share – plus: every issue is designed by a different Art Director!
So it was an enormous pleasure and honour when they asked us to design the 70th issue of their magazine with the topic “Trust”.
If we didn’t have them until now, now we definitely have some trust issues!
Mural design for childrens intensive care and maternity ward at the state hospital in Feldkirch: a place where joy and suffering are very close to each other, often only a few minutes apart. They asked us to breathe life into their cool, white walls. Simple beauty made of generous shapes and delicate colors to radiate calmness and friendliness. Abstract enough so people can reflect every kind of feeling or mood in these compositions. Activity for the eyes, mirror for the soul.
White rubber rabbit by NIBA. Photographs of the mural by Darko Todorovic.
Our design hand painted on the Indbiss food truck. You might know that the most famous food in Berlin is the “Currywurst”, a sausage with curry ketchup every Berlin tourist tries. So when Chayatan Singh approached us, we immediately loved the concept of an Indian guy selling the “Original Indian Currywurst” in Berlin. It takes some balls to do that. And some patience to hand paint an entire food truck.
White rubber rabbit by NIBA. Photographs of the truck by Matthias Piket.
We designed this invitation for a Networking Cocktail at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce during the Food Fair in Barcelona. Our idea was to shrink-wrap interesting-looking slices of fruit and place the invitation text as a sticker directly on the shrink-wrap. As always in non-conventional production it is pivotal to find patient and nice collaborators. People who understand your weird-sounding project, let you use dangerous machinery you don’t know how to handle and patiently test out alternatives until you have found what you are looking for (like several rounds of tryouts to find out which fruit and vegetables would conserve well and which would turn into disgusting mush in a matter of hours).
In this case we found that help in Javi, a butcher at a poshish deli-shop and Restaurant called “Pirineo en Boca”. Let us tell you a bit about Javi, because he is not your typical butcher: When he is not working his day-job, he might just be getting another tattoo on his arms (although there is not a lot of space left), extending his earlobes even a little more or practicing the art of “Kinbaku”, the japanese style of bondage he is so very fond of. We want to specially thank him because he was so friendly, helpful and just a pleasure to work with. Without him slicing the fruit on a meat-cutting machine into precise slices and shrink-wrapping them the end result would not have looked as good. We also want to thank the rest of the “Pirineo en Boca”-Team, especially Diana and Anouk.
Do you know what the least common denominator is? Without getting too much into detail why, some projects start out very nice, you have a concept that everyone agrees on, its clear, understandable, it bridges from the artists to the audience, explains itself, looks good and has this eye catching quality. And then someone comes along and starts to cut, first a little, than more and more like a rabid barber whose drugs start to kick in while he’s cutting. Like when you wanted to trim your ends, and now you have a fancy pixie haircut that doesn’t look bad, but it is not what you wanted, and people don’t recognise you anymore and somehow its not your style.
Yes, you do the maths, thats what happened to this project. Still looking nice but why a triangle? Why the brackets? There are brackets? Exactly! Thats what we refer to …
You arrived on this page because you caressed a rubber rabbit by NIBA
We were asked to do an exhibition of our graphic work by Advantage Austria in Barcelona. But we didn’t want to make a showcase of our – without any doubt outstanding – work, but rather play with the perception of Austria abroad. So we collected a lot of those stereotypes and sayings and put them through our graphical grinder. The outcome was a participative exhibition where nothing was what it seemed, people could take there part of Austria home with them and after finding out that Beethoven was German, everyone was hunting Hitler in the huge Wordpuzzle.
International understanding par excellence!
You arrived on this page because you caressed a red rubber rabbit by NIBA
