A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL) is a design agency which investigates, explores, collects, experiments and creates design. Established in 20013 by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas, just after graduating from the Royal College of Art.
The APFEL Shop offers products, publications and prints available for sale from their retail space in Bethnal Green (temporarily closed due to Covid-19), and through their online store.
The APFEL Type Foundry publishes a growing library of typefaces developed through visual, textual and experiential research. The Foundry also offers a bespoke type design service, through which the studio accepts commissions for typeface design, logotype design and custom cuts of APFEL typefaces for context-specific use.
Employees include:
Kirsty Carter, Director
Emma Thomas, Director
Daniel Griffiths, Associate Director
Anna Lisa Reynolds, Communication & Editorial Manager
Joanna Rutter, Senior Designer
Olivia Diaz, Senior Designer
Matt Kay, Junior Designer
Opening Hours Monday – Friday, 9 – 6pm by appointment.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-studio-apfel-on-opening-its-own-type-foundry/
One of our favorite design studios, APFEL, has just announced the launch of its eponymous type foundry, which is something of a cause for celebration. “Type design has always been at the center of our working methodology as a graphic design studio, so this feels like a natural progression for us,” the studio tells us. “It’s been an ambition of ours for a long time to launch our own foundry; we can trace it back to 2009 when we started work on The Hepworth Wakefield identity, and developed the typeface for that institution as an integral part of the identity we designed for them.”
From the gate of their east London studio onwards, you get a sense of graphic designers Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas’ approach. Their agency name is written in letters sketched specifically for the metalwork, and produced according to the proportions of the golden ratio. The name spelt out is Apfel which stands for A Practice For Everyday Living, a nod to the title of French scholar Michel de Certeau’s 1980 book, The Practice of Everyday Life.
Carter and Thomas started the company in 2003, after meeting on the Royal College of Art’s communication, art and design course. They were inspired by De Certeau’s description of “a way of making sense of a place by collecting materials, subverting existing patterns and drawing together new stories”. As Carter says: “We loved the connection of De Certeau’s writing … the references you gather from your daily rituals of everyday life.”
Now Apfel is the art world’s favourite studio, working with institutions such as the Tate and individual artists, designing posters, art books, exhibition signage and invitations – encompassing everything from the micro to the macro.
Its breakthrough moment came in 2011, overseeing the visual identity for The Hepworth Wakefield, the museum dedicated to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, creating new typefaces, signage and wayfinding, as well as website and permanent exhibition graphics. “It was unusual for them to trust a single design agency, let alone one so young,” says Thomas.
The project is typical of the space they like to work in: that intersection between art and design in areas involving what Carter describes as “a closeness and a conversation: a sense of collaboration”.
This attention to detail is clear in all its projects. Apfel makes books and catalogues for Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes. All feature exposed binding, which echoes the stitching in Antunes’ work. The packaging Apfel created for the shoe brand John Lobb has a speckled pattern inspired by the shavings and spatters found on the company’s workshop floor.
The duo seem particularly proud of their work creating artist monographs, which they have done for names including Lee Krasner, David Hockney and Jeremy Deller. “Printed material is a space in the same way an exhibition is,” says Thomas. De Certeau couldn’t have put it better.
For a Classic Experience: A Practice for Everyday Life, Design studio founded by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas
The Marksman on Hackney Road is a rare find: a proper pub that has kept its East End character, whilst offering a brilliant menu of modern British food. The upstairs dining room, designed by Martino Gamper, has been the scene of many an APFEL Christmas party—but we’re equally as likely to stop by for a drink after a day in the studio.
Since APFEL’s founding 15 years ago by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas, straight out of their art school MA course, its portfolio has been characterized by work that’s thoughtful, often pared-back, and always striking, for clients including Tate, the Barbican, Studio Voltaire, Lisson Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, and The Whitechapel Gallery. Confident yet minimal, its work eschews ornament and illustrative sensibilities in favor of considered use of physical materials and heavily typographical approaches, with the team often designing bespoke typefaces when the project calls for it.
This smart yet subtle style works perfectly for applications such as exhibition graphics and artists’ books. But in the hubbub of something like the biennale, weren’t they tempted to put all that aside and go gung-ho for impact? “I think you get noticed more sometimes with a more minimal take, because Venice itself is quite a visual city,” Carter says.
Thomas adds: “The designs in Venice need to work clearly across multiple applications. You’ve got signage—a banner on a canal—and you need to be able to read the artist’s name at a distance, and you also need to have consistency so that people will recognize [the artist] in a simple way.”
A Practice for Everyday Life, known to most as simply Apfel, seems to be both the designers’ design studio, and the artist’s design studio. Since its inception fifteen years ago, Apfel has worked with clients including Tate, the Barbican, the Labour party, Studio Voltaire, Lisson Gallery, Kettle’s Yard and The Whitechapel Gallery. Whether on projects like the rebrand of the Architect’s Journal, graphics for John Lobb shoes or its holistic identity system for the Hepworth Wakefield, Apfel’s work is united by a confident sense of minimalist intent, often favouring a considered typographic approach over more graphical or illustrative sensibilities, and frequently designing its own bespoke typefaces for projects.
Managing to be simultaneously striking, fresh and functional; Apfel’s graphic output is a lot like its studio space. Tucked away on a pretty street just off Hackney Road in East London, the studio and its shelves are a testament to just how much beautiful design work Apfel’s made in terms of printed matter and publication design for the arts. It’s also a neatness nut’s dream: tote bags hang on an ordered, tidy peg board; each team member is assigned a tidy white draw for paper samples; and bespoke magnetic strips display Apfel’s own graphics alongside assorted ephemera that’s caught the team’s eye, including anything from local hairdresser flyers.
Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas met while studying at the RCA, united by a love of conceptual art (they namecheck Sol Lewitt, Marcel Duchamp and Daniel Buren, who they’ve since worked with as designers); and hanging out in libraries. Apfel has always been based in East London, initially bedding down there since “most of the printers and people we worked with were east, and that’s where most of the cheaper studios were too”. The team of six has been in the current space for around a year, reworking it with architects OMMX from a “bit of a dump” into the serene little spot it is now. “It’s really nice that we can all sit round one table and have that dialogue and collaboration,” says Apfel of the downstairs basement area, which houses the team most of the time. For projects that require more space, things can move to the more open ground floor.
When we meet in late March, Apfel is gearing up to go to the Venice Biennale, where it’s designed the identities for the Irish and Portuguese pavilions. Here, we discuss working with arts clients, achieving boldness through subtlety, the big B (yes, Brexit) and more.
You both studied for MAs, how important do you think that was for your practice? Do you think designers today need to study postgrads, now that it’s becoming increasingly unaffordable?
Kirsty Carter: I think Emma and I have come from an era of design education which was becoming quite loose in the sense that it wasn’t focused on skills—it’s much more about concept and idea. Yeah. At that point the course, Communication in Art and Design, merged illustration, the film school and the art school together. It felt very appropriate that we just had two more years to mature because I think when we graduated we weren’t at all employable.
Emma Thomas: The briefs were so open ended, it was very rare for people to answer them with a poster, for example. I think we’ve noticed a change in students having that attitude. We’d never been asked to design a logo or anything like that, or a visual identity. When we started working together in college we shared a lot of that approach to working; which wasn’t so dictatorial, it was trying to challenge like what we can do within within a brief or questioning it.
KC: It depends on the course and the individual, but I think three years is quite a short time for graphic design. An extra year is amazing; it gives that extra time for thinking developing and going towards the working world.
What do you look for when you’re hiring a younger designer?
KC: What we were! Sprightly young things with a million ideas in their heads. Sometimes it’s quite hard to see portfolio after portfolio with work from a specific brief; and you realize you’re seeing five or six students from one course answer it in repetitive ways. It just feels like an exercise in style.
ET: It’s really rare when you meet someone with a special mind—a student equally into content and message. It sounds really obvious but it’s not that often you see those things work well together.
What do you like about working with cultural clients? How did the studio come to be so focused on that sector?
KC: Now that we’ve been going fifteen years you go on this journey, but we constantly go back to the founding DNA of mine and Emma’s interests, which is contemporary art. We do other projects too, but they’re linked—we just rebranded John Lobb shoes, which was a departure. Way back in 2005, when we’d only graduated two years, we redesigned the Architect’s Journal.
It’s interesting how those are also stepping stones and often are linked to the art world, like David Chipperfield, who we worked on with the Hepworth Wakefield knew about our work through redesigning the Architect’s Journal; while the Hepworth director Simon Wallis knew our work for the art world. You realize that it’s a small world, and even if you move out of your kind of usual client base, somehow it’s all linked.
ET: A lot of our work does come out of those early interests and friendships with curators and artists. Even when we were at the RCA, and we were doing mainly personal projects that weren’t to a specific brief, we were working with curators and artists, and we realized what we could with design to bring those two worlds together. The possibilities at that time in working with contemporary art seemed super interesting to us, as a lot of our references and inspiration had been artists working in the sixties.
At the time we were graduating, in the early 2000s, it felt like there were so many opportunities with publications, materials, projects and exhibitions to work with artists and make extensions of their own practice as well. We were having dialogues with artists about understanding how their work could develop in print, or what we could do together with a book project for instance.
How far have things changed now?
KC: One thing that’s hugely different from fifteen years ago is that then, artists, galleries and museums weren’t so savvy in terms of the idea of a brand but today, places like Tate have established that there’s a certain sophistication expected from a gallery. With things like social media, today, everything’s Instagrammable. The books that are produced for galleries are measured in a different way now. We used to do design a lot of invitations and small booklets and more ephemeral print things—that doesn’t exist so much any more.
ET: In terms of print for galleries, they invest more into serious publications now. Our approach is always to totally understand how an artist works and create something very specific for that project, and that changes a lot with the context of where it’s going to live.
What are the main considerations as designers working with arts clients?
KC: We always try to take backward steps in terms of our aesthetic. I think that’s one of the things that we really pride ourselves on as a studio—the forefront is that artist’s work. We’re trying to communicate their aesthetic, their ideas; so that it leaves us with quite an eclectic mix of projects, which we love. Our approach is very subtle and very minimal, often, and I think that that’s sometimes underrated or under-appreciated.
ET: I think it’s also led us to a slightly more typographic approach, because if we’re doing an artist exhibition that’s a group show for example, you wouldn’t really want to put one artist’s work on the cover of a book or promotion. So we were coming up with something which wasn’t necessarily a visual or an image, but something typographic that would communicate some of the ideas in that show. We quite like the restrictions that gives us. We’ve also often had a small budget, so only being able to work with one or two colours has created some quite interesting work.
Now that people are perhaps more aware of things like branding and so on, are clients becoming more open to experimental or unusual approaches to design?
KC: I think in the publishing world they’ve realized that books have to be really special objects now to exist. So there’s investment in terms of production, paper stocks and so on to make it a bit more unique—more of a sculptural object. There’s obviously still budgetary constraints, but then at the same time, I think they realized that they can’t just churn out these kind things that feel quite chuckaway now that we can see so much on the web.
You’ve worked with the Barbican on a lot of different projects over the years, what makes a good collaboration or client?
ET: I guess the chemistry: just being able to actually have a dialogue and an understanding of where each other’s coming from, whether that’s an artist or a curator or a client in another field. A good example is Faye Toogood, who we’ve worked with for years on most of her graphics. We started working on her furniture brand around 2008 and on the fashion label she’s got with her sister Erica, that goes back to 2013.
What projects have stood out for you over the years, or changed how you work as a studio?
KC: The Hepworth Wakefield was massive for us, it’s quite hard to get that sort of commission even for the biggest agencies. We did every aspect, the signage, way finding, brand identity, all the marketing materials. It was a very holistic approach from the beginning. When we started on the project [the gallery] was still in build and it was a very small team, and we were quite unknown at that point. It opened in 2011 and all these years later they’re still carrying on with the same identity—often there’s a temptation to change it, but I think it really works for them.
At that point in time, a brand of such delicateness didn’t really exist, but we were responding to this idea of what the architecture looked like and wanted it to be a sort of antidote to this quite hard concrete building. [Barbara Hepworth’s] work has that element in the scale and the materials she’s using, but there is also a certain delicateness to it.
ET: That elegance and the curves and the geometry came into typefaces we created: from a brand perspective, it wasn’t really hard and big and “out there”. It was very delicate, and the typeface is thin enough to mean we could be more bold in using it over the top of artists’ work or images, and that came from an understanding of the art world as well.
Last year you created your We Remain Europe Brexit tote bags. As designers, what do you think the impact of Brexit could potentially be?
KC: We commission a lot of printing outside of the UK, and with publications, they’ll often outsource the binding too—there just aren’t many existing bindaries left in the UK. It’s going to cost us and our clients a lot. We can already see the problems with attracting talent to the studio, people don’t want to make the commitment to move here. We’re already seeing far less Erasmus applications.
ET: For the [design] industry too and how we work in London, we’re surrounded by creatives—that’s the reason why we’re all here. The majority of our friends are all from different countries. One of the reasons people want to be in London is because of that mix; for music and art, if movement isn’t so free, how interesting is it going to be in future? It’s depressing to talk about. I guess [Brexit] is embarrassing, as well horrible.
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