By O.K. Parking /asdf 30-05-2008

O.K. Parking is specialised in the conceptual development and graphic design of visual communication. Since 2005 they have worked in graphic design, especially in interactive media design. They also lecture at the ArtEZ Academy of Visual Arts, Arnhem and initiate and organise informative evenings about graphic design.

Designers excluded!

A festival for graphic design? Seems a bit much, given that design is one the least dispensable crafts in the world. But still, nice to see what's hip and happening, of course! As a designer, you need to keep in touch, after all. And when you're asked to design a poster campaign, a Projectre Spectre installation and to write a column vfor design.nl you think: it's always great to be busy!
Knowing secretly that (as always) there are too many deadlines to be met.

All the same, you shrug your soldiers and get on with things as if that's what you really want to do. And you do, too. For the poster campaign we came up with something old-fashioned (ask yourself the question: why don't we do that more often). With the Projecter Spectre installation we wanted to make an accessible interaction with passers-by on the hairdresser's window. The
installation will be effective just because they'll be relatively inactive, because interaction is often more interesting when you approach it from the point of view of inactivity. And that is certainly the case with the wonderful little world that we have created. And this column of course, which has to be about something, I don't know what, it can be about anything, they say, as if that makes it easier, but no way, I just write whatever without bothering about the spelling mistakes.

To indulge in a little self-promotion: we've been really busy the last while completing our first magazine, called O.K. Collections. We will be looking for links between the internet and printing in these periodicals, which are a spin-off of the O.K. Blog (www.ok-blog.nl). The first edition is bursting with unusual collections and passionate collectors and as if you ready this will betting the bookshops (and also available at the GDFB festival in Breda! Another reason to go there!) and it is of course also available online. The wide range of collections varies from Mountains of plastic cutlery to black metal band logo's, and insect wings.

And yet that's what graphic design is; hunting up and collecting objects, images, texts, etc.; everything that you can perceive with the senses and that inspires you to make a design yourself. Above all, projects initiated in this way provide real satisfaction, that transform passion and tension from idea to object, to something that keeps you busy day and night. And this is what I'm interested in seeing at the festival. Not the over-designed graphic designs themselves, but the sources of inspiration that cause butterflies in the stomach.

Add to favorites