Design

Week three of Insights features New York based Project Projects on Tuesday, March 18, at 7 pm in the Walker cinema. Tickets are available here.

Before joining forces to form Project Projects in 2004, Adam Michaels, a Minneapolis College of Art and Design graduate, was associate art director of Architecture magazine; and Prem Krishnamurthy, a Yale University graduate, had completed a Fulbright Fellowship and worked as a designer in Berlin and New York. The two forged a cool, calm, and collected aesthetic that resonates with their nonprofit and cultural sector clientele. Project Projects has emerged as a leading design studio working for such organizations as Artists Space, Creative Time, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Metropolis magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Princeton Architectural Press, the Van Alen Institute, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Their work has been featured in Japan’s most progressive graphic design magazine, IDEA, as one of 100 of the world’s most interesting studio practices, and identified by the Art Directors Club of New York and Print magazine as a new design firm to watch.

In anticipation for Tuesday’s lecture, both Adam and Prem were kind enough to answer a few of life’s most–and possibly least–pressing questions:

Adam Michaels:

1. What have you been obsessing about?

This photograph:

Depicting the Swedish psychedelic rock band Trd, Grs och Stenar on tour in Stockholm in 1971. Talk about hybrid modernities…

2. What’s your most prized possession?

One strong contender would be this painting:

Which I purchased directly from its maker, John Fahey, for $5 on May 23, 1998. That evening, he performed an experimental electric guitar set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, IL, making for a stunning amalgamation of eccentric American genius. Fahey dressed for the occasion in red sweat shorts, a ragged red t-shirt, and massive red and white hi-tops.

3. What are you reading?

I just finished Enter Naomi by Joe Carducci, a fragmented but worthwhile first-person account of the early- to mid-period of SST records. Otherwise, I’m a big fan of Owen Hatherley’s two blogs, Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy and The Measures Taken.

4. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?

Excessive time spent at the studio (such as right now, for example)

5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue

Is versatility considered a virtue?

6. What is one of the most unexpected influences on your design?

I must admit I’m struggling to separate the unexpected from the expected here…

7. What were you doing before you responded to this questionnaire?

Typesetting

8. What question do you wish we’d asked you?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

…

Prem Krishnamurthy:

1. What have you been obsessing about?

Klaus Wittkugel (1910-1985), an under-recognized East German designer

2. What’s your most prized possession?

My Leica M6.

3. What are you reading?

The Forger by Cioma Schonhaus and Alan Bance; Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald

4. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?

Madonna

5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Reserve

6. What is one of the most unexpected influences on your design?

H.P. Lovecraft

7. What were you doing before you responded to this questionnaire?

Teaching someone how to make Photoshop masks to color-correct photographs

8. What question do you wish we’d asked you?

What book do I wish I had never read?