Photo © Gerhard Kassner

1. How can work itself be social?

With her exhibition design for RADICAL NATURE at the Barbican in 2009 she was trying to learn a lot from her research. Therefore she set up a manifesto of what sustainable, green graphic design is (which ink and paper should be used, dealing cleverly with resources,…). For the exhibition, they were recycling interior from former exhibitions. New furniture was constructed without power tools. Instead of gluing exhibition captions to the wall, they were just using nails. Since the Barbican’s archive was full of unused posters, they decided to use the reverse of those (which is in general blue) for creating a new poster series for their exhibition. The catalogue of the show was printed in a very low edition, every extra catalogue that was requested was printed on demand. Sara managed to keep the resources for this exhibition very low and in that sense green.

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3. Graphic designers as a social community

Occasional papers is a self initiated project that allows ‘content heavy’ publishing, and understands the book as a generator of conversation. Books should be affordable, and available for everyone, in order to achieve an enriching exchange of ideas. This is a continuing project, and always allows new directions and point of views which are often gathered at workshops.

Sara De Bondt

Sara De Bondt is a London-based, Belgian graphic designer and she is also publisher and editor of Occational Papers, a non-profit publisher of affordable books on the history of architecture, art, design, film and literature. Making knowledge available and affordable to all has become one of her central issues since starting Sara De Bondt studio in 2003. The studio’s approach is research and idea driven, with strong emphasis on visual clarity and typographic detailing. It actively seeks out collaboration, both with its clients and colleagues, which has led to a wide range of projects from international clients such as Guggenheim, WIELS, Tate, ICA, V&A, Artissima, Interieur 2010, WIELS, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MK Gallery, and many more. Sara is a Visiting Professor at School of Arts, Ghent, and previously taught at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. She has given talks and workshops at conferences such as Integrated (Antwerp), Spark (Auckland), Otis (Los Angeles) and Kolla (Stockholm). In 2008 she founded Occasional Papers together with Antony Hudek, and since then has co-edited three books: The Master Builder: Talking with Ken Briggs, The Form of the Book Book (with Fraser Muggeridge) and Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011) (with Catherine de Smet).

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Thank you Sara for being such an inspiring, graphic designer, showing us, that content based graphics can look different from the broad mass, and be beautiful and clever at the same time.

By Sandra and Julia / Graphic Birdwatching