David Rudnick & Avant Arte
New collaboration coming soon
“We need to reject the notion that, as designers, we work for our clients. The people we work for are our audience. Neglect that, and we start to build dystopias.”
Graphic design as world building.
David Rudnick reinvents past tropes and codes to establish new visual systems. His ornate typefaces and dawn-of-the-internet visuals have become synonymous with millennial subcultures and their tendencies towards political resistance. For two decades he has created posters, music videos, album covers, performances, books and art-objects. Processes are wilfully laborious, with many designs drawn with his laptop's built-in trackpad or crafted using self-made tools and programmes. Rudnick describes his practice as “primacist” in nature, framing contemporary image-making as a “struggle for primacy...
Bio
David Rudnick (he/him) was born in 1986 in London. He is now based in Ghent, Belgium, where he works from a collaborative studio – Terrain.
Career
At the age of eight, Rudnick’s gateway into design was the album leaflet for The Best of New Order (1994). His collaborations since, with musicians including Evian Christ, Oneohtrix Point Never and M.I.A, have exerted profound influence both within and beyond this sphere.
Process
A self-taught designer, for nearly a decade Rudnick’s chosen design tool has been a 2012 Macbook Pro on account of its 1-to-1 pixel mapping. “It’s the best screen Apple ever produced,” he says, “it has the widest colour gamut and the deepest black.”
Watch
- 47:48
Read
47:48interviewDavid Rudnick & Tim Marlow
Meeting for the first time, graphic designer David Rudnick and Design Museum Director Tim Marlow discuss false dichotomies, paradigm shifts, 'junk layer' culture and the multifarious challenges and opportunities faced by artists and designers in a Web3 age.
- article
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