Our good friend Jess Henderson (pseud.) just published her first book Offline Matters, the less digital guide to creative work, and we’re beyond proud. Not because we designed it, but because this document feels like the so much needed wake-up-call, both confronting and insightful, inspiring and resonating.
Over the past months Jordi and I have been working together to shape and form the content that initially started in the form of the Outsider newsletter into a small but heavy-on-content ‘work book’. Written around a theme that resonated on so many levels with what we do, how we work, and with whom, Offline Matters became a handbook of radical strategies for creative workers. The guide blows open the true state of today’s creative work where digital solutions are doctrine, overwork culture results in burnouts and ideas churn out into depressing marketing noise.

Earlier this year Rop van Mierlo and Remco van der Velden launched their collaborative project Wild Animals with the first edition called Tiger Merch. A beautiful collection of products consisting of mugs, sweaters, art prints, t-shirts, socks, a pyjama, a rug and even wrapping paper, all with the characteristically painted Tiger by Rop van Mierlo.

In the heat of everything that has been taking place throughout the world it’s encouraging, inspiring and very educational to hear the many voices that need to be heard and understood and see the extraordinary initiatives all over the world in search for more equality. What touched us in particular is See In Black. A project where over 80 black photographers are selling original prints to raise funds for five non-profits that work to dismantle white supremacy and systematic oppression. See In Black’s “Black America Vol. 1” project is a highly-curated stock of images from photographers including Andre Wagner, Flo Ngala, and Renell Medrano that are on sale now.

Greek photographer Yiannis Hadjiaslanis shared his latest project ‘Ascension’ with us. Shot on two visits to Mt. Bromo, in 2017, and 2020. Hadjiaslanis work explores narratives of places, documenting locations in Greece, across the Mediterranean and the African continent, he engages with questions of historical memory, the present conditions and speculated futures of lived environments, and their significance for those who live, create, interact and evolve with them. Whit his latest project Hadjiaslanis explores the Indonesian Mount Bromo, an open and bare landscape covered with ash in million shades of grey. A ‘Sea of Sand’.

Over the course of multiple years, both industrial designers Hank Beyer and Alex Sizemore, explored parts of the American Midwest researching eight material origins and their associated processes and history. Resulting in this highly aesthetic project called For the Rest of Us: A Journey into the Intangible Values of Regional Materials and Personal Computing. They’ve travelled extensively, interviewing dozens of people, collecting artefacts and taking pictures. From each material Beyer and Sizemore created a computer, providing a point of familiarity to an alternative reality.

Last year the Paris running shop Distance published their first book called ITEN by photographer and artistic director Thibaut Grevet, with the aim to produce a singular vision of some of the world’s most emblematic places related to running and its culture. Earlier this year they published their second book, now in collaboration with photographer Wendy Huynh. A beautiful hardcover with 170 pages filled with images shot on Reunion Island during the incredible Grand Raid or Diagonale des fous. We asked Yoann Wenger from Distance for a little Q&A with Wendy on how the book came about.