Talking Ceramics I

The necessity to bake this book in the oven before reading captures the excitement, anxiety and surprise in creating ceramics. The striking transformation from completely white to black reveals the cover design.

The oven plays a major role in the ceramic process in which clay can only be controlled to a certain extent. Artists can spend weeks preparing their object yet when it finally goes into the oven control is taken out of their hands. Even the most experienced can open the oven after a weekend of firing to find disaster.

The special edition of this book also features an extremely thin ceramic cover that inevitably will break. Thus, like the artist, making you experience the fragility and inadvertent beauty of the material.

The EKWC is a prominent centre for ceramic experimentation. This book discusses the experiences and most importantly mistakes their past artists-in-residence have encountered.

We enjoy working at the cutting edge, challenging ourselves and those around us, looking further than the length of our nose. Our way of working is between that of a design studio and an ad agency. We create conceptually and strategically strong projects with clear, clever designs and solutions. We think before we act, but we act before we talk. That is what we call Smart Design.

Smart Design on a daily basis means that we work for very different clients, like museums, cities, government, educational institutes, charity but also pr-marketing agencies and commercial clients. We like to work on total concepts, to create not only the logo but also the name of the product, the image, the message, the strategy. This results in a strong graphic design in which the form follows the content. And because of this we are a multi-disciplinary agency that works in the field of identity design, publication design, event design, exhibition design, campaign design.