A Calendar for Kolo

Another calendar we did last year was also for Sloma&Trymbulak ordered by Koło Association. The organization for people with disabilities wanted to present its members in a series of upbeat, colorful, fashion-styled photographs that were taken by Mirek Trymbulak. All the photographs showed two people: a member of the association with somebody important to them, focusing on the theme of relationships.

First page of the calendar was printed on white tracing paper with the year and a grid of colorful squares. Each square covered a portrait printed on the cover. Once the tracing paper was lifted, the actual cover showed with miniatures of photos from the calendar and colorful squares instead of the year.

For typography we used a combination of Filosofia and Avenir. We particularly enjoy the digits of Filosofia for their simultaneously playful and elegant look. Each month has a lead color matching the photo and the colors were also used on the square grid on the tracing paper.

A Different Kind of Sports Calendar

Another calendar we did this year is for the local women basketball team (we also did their calendar last year). While last year the calendar played with 20s stylization, this year the photos resembled more generic fashion photographs so that the players could look feminine and elegant. Each page has a sponsor company and the background of the photo is a nod to this company’s activities.

Everything about the photographs, except for retouching, was done by Sloma&Trymbulak, and this includes the original concept, stylization and shooting.

The cover consists of twelve portraits of models and the portrait of the team’s president.

Each page has a dominant color suggested by the company’s logo and the color scheme of the photo. The small sports portrait of a player makes you admire the transformations. The calendar uses large, clean typography.

The World According to Alexander Aksinin

A while ago we did an initial design of a catalog for an exhibition of a Ukrainian artist Alexander Aksinin. Aksinin created etching prints, color and black and white, employing unusual formats and developing his personal mythology. He died tragically in 1985 but still has devoted following, representatives of which organized the exhibition in our city in the Pionova gallery.

The final version of the catalog was expertly executed by Joanna Kurowska.

Cover by Joanna Kurowska with the artist’s personal monogram.

Title page. The motif of cross repeats throughout Aksinin’s work and so we used the cross-hair as the dominant ornament which also organizes many pages. This worked especially well with the four languages (Polish, English, Ukrainian and Russian) of the catalog. Here a title page in all the languages.

We used Warnock because we needed a typeface that has Cyrillic glyphs but also as a challenge: it seemed easier to use a sans serif as more natural to us but we wanted to work with a serif typeface for a change. Both italics and larger size texts turned out as elegant as we hoped. For budget reasons most pages are black and white but when possible we used green and red as colors dominating Aksinin’s palette.

Title page of the biographical note with the author’s photo.

Title pages of introductory essays.

Tasteful Amber Calendar

Usually the calendars we work on have much less boobs than the one we showed last time – and we count ourselves lucky for that. Today’s calendar was designed for The Atelier of Taste culinary show, whose calendar we also designed last year, and continued it visually with this one.

This year The Atelier of Taste produced a series called Amber Atelier, honoring the historical importance of amber in our region. They cooperated with local restaurants, showing the viewers those restaurants’ recipes for vegan and vegetarian dishes. The calendar presents a choice of twelve dishes illustrated with photos from the show.

Also, each month is additionally illustrated with a piece of jewelry designed by a student of the local Academy of Fine Arts, who used amber in their pieces. While working on the calendar we could choose the pieces to feature freely, albeit from a limited amount, so we made it a point to try and match the piece with the dish presented (which sometimes worked better and sometimes worse, I guess).

Quite obviously, the amber theme also determined the color scheme and so instead of varied colors we used last year, this year we chose primarily orange.