Rothko-esque
Reviewed by Thomas Barnett
Dutch studio FCKLCK’s all-caps, blood-red website is full of declarations of belligerent provocations such as ‘OUR FAVOURITE CLIENTS ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE EVEN BIGGER BALLS THAN WE DO’. Talk of ‘CUTTING THROUGH THE BULLSHIT’ is accompanied by a mouseover gif of a defecating bovine. The name is of course an expletive repudiation of serendipity (who needs luck when you’ve such prodigious knackers, right?). Yet, such apparent brashness belies a perspicacity and lightness of touch that allows FCKLCK to create work like its identity for Moksi, a unisex skincare brand that creates skincare products for people who are undergoing cancer treatment.
FCKLCK was approached in late 2022 by aspiring entrepreneur Lies De Nyn. Having recently overcome breast cancer, Lies experienced firsthand the challenges of sourcing and evaluating skincare products compatible with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and other cancer treatments. As Moksi explains on its website, one of the many side effects of cancer treatments is that ‘your skin’s natural immunity and protective barrier can become compromised, making it highly sensitive to certain ingredients, products and environmental factors’.
In addition to a specially tailored formula, the branding for such a product needs to be precisely calibrated to speak to people for whom illness has become something that begins to define them in the totalising experience of being ‘a patient’. Moksi aims to reclaim some of life’s simple pleasures from the cavernous maw of illness and treatment. Skincare is ritual, and ritual is profoundly human and humanising. FCKLCK’s work for Moksi recognises those essential truths.…
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Quality X Experience
Reviewed by Emily Gosling
Even the most fleeting scan through &Walsh’s portfolio makes it wholly unsurprising how Jessica Walsh’s semi-eponymous studio has achieved such a brilliant reputation. While Walsh herself has garnered countless design press column inches – as partner at Sagmeister & Walsh; one half of the 40 Days of Dating project; a creative conference regular; and an advocate for women in design – the work speaks for itself.
Since its founding in 2019, the studio has rapidly fostered a thoroughly distinctive look for its projects – they’re totally, definitely ‘&Walsh’, but without resorting to a uniformly predictable house style.
As such, there’s a fair few similarities between this recent &Walsh project and the one I previously covered on BP&O. Last autumn we discussed &Walsh’s visual identity for ad agency GUT, a beguiling black and white creation based around a shape-shifting logo referencing the undulating tubular forms of actual human guts.
This time round, &Walsh has worked on another ad agency identity – Quality Experience (QX), which is led by former DDB global CCO Ari Weiss alongside Cristina Reina, former global creative director at McCann, and previous Droga5 big-guns Dan Gonda and Colleen Leddy.…
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Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014
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