The Drollest Invite

This must be one of the most drollest invites to the opening of a new studio ever. You can easily overlook the reversed English on the right hand side of the image. When I first handed it by one of the team (the same people who designed Pavel Makov’s website) I only acknowledged the graphic drawing was a view of their new studio….my grasp of Cyrillic is perfunctory…checked the date …..but only noticed this warning when I got there.I was pleased to discover throughout the evening of that opening that no such shenanigans ever took place in their new toilets…Not since visiting the East Berlin design team Cyan many years on a Kingston student trip have I had the pleasure of talking to designers who think ‘outside the box’ (I hate that expression, I never use it normally) and are approach clients’ briefs with an open mind and apply with great wit.Both the East Berliners and the Kharkovians blend their fine art background intelligently and seamlessly continue to execute their own projects.Partly I expect to do with their art school backgrounds of fine art discipline and rigorous intellectual debate- combined with the availability of modern day technological tools.