The elusive Flower continues to speak with a voice quiet and persistent, her words peeling at walls, grazing barbed wires, pushing against towers of authority. Like a ghost gently moving her voice never ceasing.

Forget the frivolous. Indulge in austerity. By investigating the bare basics of design through the explorations of circles, squares and triangles, the gallery store featured 30 designers and their personal interpretations of the concept ‘Back to Basics’.

The gallery store was featured as one of London’s best pop-up stores in The London Paper and was also featured on vogue.com.

We live in a society where we are constantly being told what to do. We are continuously bombarded with street signage, surveillance devices, spatial demarcations, awareness campaigns and a variety of other interventions - all with the intention to control our actions, movements and behaviour. This visual thesis aims to research and interrogate the effect these various interventions of deterrence have on their intended audience. For the purpose of this investigation, these interventions will be classified into five distinct typologies - signage, surveillance, spatial interventions, humour and campaigns that control. This series of visual mappings of the various typologies of control will provide a contextual overview of the micro and macro influences they impose on their target audience in today’s society. It is hoped that this series of investigations will remind graphic designers that their role as designer is more that of a graphic visualiser, and that there is often an alternative method to control one’s actions and decisions. Last but not least, this visual thesis hopes to serve as a critique to the society we live in.

My Garden is…

A collaboration between Singaporean designers Ashley Isham, Melisa Chan and David Lee. It represents a synergy between graphics, fashion and interior design and explores the possibilities of synthetic and organic materiality. The themes of Mother Nature and pleasure in simplicity are originating concepts.

The resulting installation is a distilled interpretation of the themes of growth and metamorphosis which run through the concept of a maturing garden and in the processes employed to create the sculpture. The changing imagery, paper quality and lighting affect the overall content of the display, revealing an added dimension to the presentation.

The window at Aquaint Boutique on Conduit Street offers the appropriate location to playfully comment on layered messages of materiality through this expression of an urban garden landscape. This collaborative project is presented by the DesignSingapore Council as part of the London Design Festival 2008.

Why is there a constant need to put or re-arrange objects into order? Is there a psychological reason behind this obsessive compulsion? How can we translate this physical and psychological process through a narrative exercise of pictorial spreads?

For this project, the entire process of tidying up one’s own chaotic mess is documented through a series of black and white photographs, which is eventually designed into a narrative print sequence. Working as both author and designer,  the task is to generate, edit and visually communicate image-based content into the form of a page-based publication. The project focuses on the page as a mediator and carrier of meaning with emphasis on how narrative and meaning can work across, between and within the page.

Written over a period of twenty three years (1972–1995), this collection of 40 postcards written to Mrs Joan Nicholas Lyon offers a glimpse into her life at 23 Pont Street. Who is this mysterious Mrs Lyon? You will soon find out, through this archive of correspondence between Mrs Lyon and her family, friends and loved ones. Memories long forgotten are documented through these postcards, in an era where electronic mails are unheard of.

This selection of 40 postcards have been painstakingly reproduced as they have been found, actual size, with characters of their original reproduction, crinkly edges, bent corners and illegible handwriting.

This project explore the use of the typological classification of objects int constructing meaning. It is designed to highlight the role of collecting, archiving and taxonomy as fundamental features of research and analysis. A collection of postcards is explored and documented through various typological systems, taking into account values such as scale, material, chronology, places of origin, function etc. A final selection of 40 postcards is collated and classified into eight categories, such as number of stamps, usage of airmail label, postcards with serrated edges etc, and the overprinting of a postmark onto each postcard is used to define the categories each postcard belongs to.

Animal Vegetable Mineral is a theatrical performance about a man who turns 30 and decides he must leave his mother, father, brothers, sisters, dog, snake, spiritual advisor, best friend, lover, maid and god…for a little while.

As a parting gift, he sings them a song.

This offbeat, comic-surreal play employs found text, movement, music, singing and sound to create a no-holds-barred theatrical experience. The actors transform into various characters, jump space and time, go through spiritual cleansing, climb mountains and walk across deserts…all for the sake of one little man in pursuit of his dreams. This absurdist and eclectic spirit is transposed into its design through the use of surrealistic imagery and composition inspired by The Last Supper.

A little man goes a long way.

The memento wall is a collage of approximately 60 individual pieces of printed artwork, a retrospect of different childhood stories and experiences. Each piece of work relates an incident or memory from the past - from birthdays to weddings, from celebrations to heartaches. All the pieces are printed on a variety of materials such as letters, calendars, ticket stubs, greeting cards, envelopes, and newsprints etc, materials that can be fed through the printer and be printed on. Different images of photographs and scanned journal writings are overprinted on each piece to mimic the quality of overprint in screen-printing.

With the ballroom dancing craze sweeping across UK, this project aims to redesign and reinterpret the current instructional manual for foxtrot dancing. Basic foxtrot steps were identified, and a London tube map inspired modular design language of symbols was designed in replace of the current instructions that is made up of footsteps and arrows. The instructional manual was redesigned such that the instructions for the male dancer can be changed into that for a female dancer by rotating it 180 degrees. This allows the dancing couple to read the manual together while they learn the dance facing each other.

Elements of Chinese calligraphy are also infused into the modular symbols to bring out the fluidity of foxtrot. The symbols are then mapped onto an architectural terrain that portrays the rise and fall of the dance.

A three dimensional quality is added to the basic foxtrot grid pattern when a tapestry of paper strips are used to visualise the flow of the foxtrot dance. The paper tapestry is inspired by how lines of different curvatures are used to chart different long haul or short domestic air flight routes. A thick, low strip of paper signifies a heavy and slow step while a thin, high strip conveys a quick and light step.

Romantic shades of lilac and pink are used to accentuate the mood of the foxtrot dance, and the tapestry of foxtrot-inspired pattern is translated onto a cylindrical lampshade, casting tinges of spiraled pink hues onto the walls.

‘Mari Kita’ is the opening line of the Singaporean national anthem. Most Singaporeans are able to recite the entire anthem with ease, but most failed to comprehend its meaning because it is written in the Malay language, while the majority of Singaporeans are Chinese. This project aims to investigate and develop a graphical language that aims to transcend the linguistics of the English language, while bringing in cultural references that makes Singapore truly unique.

The original Malay anthem is translated into Singlish (Singapore English) – a colloquial mix of Chinese dialects, Malay and Indian Tamil language. Robert Plutchik’s colour theory of emotion is then used to colour the translation. Each colour used from the spectrum denotes a specific emotion, and the different colours used hope to give the viewers a chromatic understanding of the various emotions of the anthem, even without understanding the language in which it is written.

Drawing inspiration from how visible speech is annotated, a new language of consonants, vowels, glides and diphthongs is designed to translate the spoken Singaporean language into graphical symbols. The new visual language designed is based on a grid that drew references from Malay Islamic patterns.