KarlssonWilker tends to stay away from pastiche and mimicry, prioritising modular communication and original editorial mechanics in order to centre emotional intelligence and clarity. In the studio’s identity for Calder Gardens, a green space and art museum in Philadelphia, the team began with no plan whatsoever. For projects for the broader public, KarlssonWilker tries to be “oblivious to tastes and possibilities”, because usually everything from physical constraints to board member opinions will cut down the studio’s initial ideas. Working closely with Sandy Rower, who never let the studio “get away with shortcuts”, the identity’s logo is deceptively brilliant, utilising a slow fade that is as calm as nature itself, with adjacent lettering that – if you look long enough – appears more and more 3D, speaking to the spaciousness of Calder Gardens. In fact, so much went into this identity that there is a book dedicated the entire creative process behind it.
Jan is very honest about the behind-the-scenes of the studio’s processes. With the identity of the Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland, the studio presented everything it had, but nothing stuck. Determined to crack the code, the studio kept going until it landed on a design featuring an extruded triangle, which explodes into trippy, fractal patterns and moves across the museum’s website with a glitchy trail.
With the identity for Remai Art Museum in Canada, once again the duo could only shrug and laugh. KarlssonWilker had come up with a “strange, borderline idiotic” way of writing Remai Modern, featuring redundant lower-case letters in front of the words. “To this day, we are not sure what this is. What we do know is that it seems to work semantically, not semiotically, like most other logos, which makes it strange,” says Jan. “The client was as weirded out and unsure as we were, and that feeling seemed to embody this institution very well. Kudos to the museum’s director.”
KarlssonWilker are usually seen as the “non-corporate” option and thus, clients that value human connection flock to the studio’s unique, almost anarchistic approach. It’s hard to not love the way that the creative duo throw caution to the wind. Championing rawness and embracing clients with a penchant of risk taking, Jan doesn’t see this as heedless, but more so a practice of controlled chaos. “Friction keeps you awake and alert, and surprised and present, it rattles you or amuses you, it does something, however small. We get very quickly bored with things we have experienced before,” says Jan. “For us, not knowing where we are going, is not recklessness, we see it as a craft we acquired over the last two decades.”