{"id":223797,"date":"2026-01-06T16:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T16:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/223797\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T16:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T16:57:08","slug":"karlssonwilker-on-harnessing-the-art-of-the-unexpected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/223797\/","title":{"rendered":"KarlssonWilker on harnessing the art of the unexpected"},"content":{"rendered":"

KarlssonWilker tends to stay away from pastiche and mimicry, prioritising modular communication and original editorial mechanics in order to centre emotional intelligence and clarity. In the studio\u2019s identity for Calder Gardens<\/a>, a green space and art museum in Philadelphia, the team began with no plan whatsoever. For projects for the broader public, KarlssonWilker tries to be \u201coblivious to tastes and possibilities\u201d, because usually everything from physical constraints to board member opinions will cut down the studio\u2019s initial ideas. Working closely with Sandy Rower, who never let the studio \u201cget away with shortcuts\u201d, the identity\u2019s logo is deceptively brilliant, utilising a slow fade that is as calm as nature itself, with adjacent lettering that \u2013 if you look long enough \u2013 appears more and more 3D, speaking to the spaciousness of Calder Gardens. In fact, so much went into this identity that there is a book dedicated the entire creative process behind it.<\/a><\/p>\n

Jan is very honest about the behind-the-scenes of the studio\u2019s processes. With the identity of the Reykjavik Art Museum<\/a> in Iceland, the studio presented everything it had, but nothing stuck. Determined to crack the code, the studio kept going until it landed on a design featuring an extruded triangle, which explodes into trippy, fractal patterns and moves across the museum\u2019s website with a glitchy trail.<\/p>\n

With the identity for Remai Art Museum<\/a> in Canada, once again the duo could only shrug and laugh. KarlssonWilker had come up with a \u201cstrange, borderline idiotic\u201d way of writing Remai Modern, featuring redundant lower-case letters in front of the words. \u201cTo this day, we are not sure what this is. What we do know is that it seems to work semantically, not semiotically, like most other logos, which makes it strange,\u201d says Jan. \u201cThe client was as weirded out and unsure as we were, and that feeling seemed to embody this institution very well. Kudos to the museum\u2019s director.\u201d<\/p>\n

KarlssonWilker are usually seen as the \u201cnon-corporate\u201d option and thus, clients that value human connection flock to the studio\u2019s unique, almost anarchistic approach. It\u2019s hard to not love the way that the creative duo throw caution to the wind. Championing rawness and embracing clients with a penchant of risk taking, Jan doesn\u2019t see this as heedless, but more so a practice of controlled chaos. \u201cFriction keeps you awake and alert, and surprised and present, it rattles you or amuses you, it does something, however small. We get very quickly bored with things we have experienced before,\u201d says Jan. \u201cFor us, not knowing where we are going, is not recklessness, we see it as a craft we acquired over the last two decades.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KarlssonWilker tends to stay away from pastiche and mimicry, prioritising modular communication and original editorial mechanics in order…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-223797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}