Turn on, tune in, drop out.
We've had a psychedelic experience! Our consciousness has been opened by a unique hand-dyed paper from the last century. We also recoded the designer Pavel Kahotski to another level of mind and together we fell into 60s design from Sweden. This resulted in a unique set of boxes for the brands IOKO and Nasstasia Alienikava. Hold on.
Years ago, when we brought the now essentially historical printing equipment from Sweden, we were in for many surprises. Some of the cast-iron machines had been in full swing since 1902, for example, and decades of hard, honest work breathed from the battered tools. Yet everything was in perfect working order. We even found bales of sheets of hand-coloured paper in the set. And what a discovery! A distinctive graphic material, essentially applied art, created at a time when all such artistic endeavours were still done by hand. It's an honest water bath, paints and traditional marbling technique, no Photoshop or Illustrator. As you can see in the period photograph from the Hasslers Bokbinderi workshop, they used the paper as a cover for book covers or frontispieces.
Today we are excited about this historical heritage. But initially, we couldn't really imagine how to use this museum's psychedelic gem. And when we got tired of the papers, they went to the landfill. We figured they were just waiting for their moment. And it did come! We used them for the first time in 2018, together with designers from H&M who designed the paper range for the fashion brand "& Other Stories". Our workshop realized the order in production. The young French and Swedish people were literally blown away by the hand-dyed paper. They transformed some of it into graphic remixes of the individual products and some of the motifs were simply scanned and reproduced in offset. For example, as notebook covers.
For the second time this year, the time was right when Pavel Kahotski approached us again with the realization of the glasses packaging. Pavel wanted 100 coated boxes in magnet plates and we immediately sensed that this was a unique opportunity for our historical material. And we are very happy that we then basically tuned in together in one meeting to the idea of coating 100 unique pieces with this traditional, hand-dyed paper. It's a blast!
Each glasses box is completely different. You will find surreal to hallucinogenic motifs on them, which change unpredictably in colour, create metallic reflections and give each package an unmistakable look with a specific atmosphere and final impression. Others, on the other hand, are subtle to minimalist, but at first glance unmistakably different from works of modern computer design. Fluid, enigmatic, with a story that clearly stems from a different time. Complementing the boxes with intricate embossing with metallic foils of different colours and over-engraving the inner padding with black or white paper was actually already a standard task for our handmade production of extreme commissions.
The result of this project is completely out of line with contemporary packaging production and confirms that it is a shame to neglect history and its contemporary contributions. Just as it is a shame to be deprived of the inspiration of former works, ideas or practices. They can act as a great foundation, a unique motivation to build something completely new on top of them. Something that one would never think of in today's volatile digital world. To neglect history is to weaken ourselves, our possibilities. We like the opposite approach. And we have helped the brands IOKO and Nastassia Aleinikava to step out of today's conventions. Thank you for that!
