Spreeeng is a bit more spread out than your straightforward design studio. If you were looking at a map there would be a pattern of pins across New York, Paris, London and Stuttgart to chart its members. Working across “borders and timezones”, the graphic design cooperative brings together the creative practices of John Philip Sage, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Héloïse d’Almeida, and Roxy Zeiher – all under one (metaphorical) roof.
The group’s output primarily sits within the worlds of editorial design, exhibition graphics, visual identities and innovative type design for clients in the cultural sector, although “Spreeeng functions as a flexible constellation: shapeshifting around each project”, John tells us, and with this flexibility comes the opportunity to “expand into other disciplines through external collaborators”, they say. This reach has seen Spreeng pair up with the likes of large cultural institutions such as the V&A or The Design Museum, whilst also working closely with a host of independent artists on more community-based projects like Store Projects.
Outside of an impressively multifarious practice that goes beyond the constraints of working in any one place, the cooperative model has granted members of Spreeeng the freedom to enact something that, sadly, you don’t always see across the design industry: a horizontal model. “Distributed authorship, shared crediting, and equal pay” alongside a rejection of the design dogma that uploads prevailing studio structures have all been called into question in their practice. In the true spirit of a co-op, the group’s members also spend nearly as much time sharing knowledge from their work as they do making it, regularly hosting workshops and pedagogical experiments in collaboration with a range of institutions. Their focus on the sharing of design knowledge also translates into the group’s personal publishing projects such as Dispatches, “where the cooperative zooms in at particular snapshots of their practice”, to share in print.