Folder designs interfaces, publications, and systems for organizing, encountering, and carrying information forward. We help museums, universities, civic institutions, and others engaged in the stewardship and sharing of knowledge create ways for language, media, and material to surface and endure.
We are interested in what happens to information over time, and how form can reveal the connections that give it meaning. Projects come in a variety of configurations rooted in partnerships that honor the material and its strategic presentation.
Hosted at UCLA, Experimental Translations in/with East Asian Languages was a translingual laboratory challenging Eurocentric models by exploring East Asian translation through visual poetics, media materiality, and radical creative formats. The word “translation,” in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, is built as one wood-joined object, shown from five angles as it moves between the three scripts.
Bungaku Bideo is a film series bringing together films rooted in literature, moving poetry exploring the relationship between cinematic and written form. The initiative partnered with acclaimed independent animators and contemporary writers to introduce Japanese prose and poetry to international film festival audiences.
The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, in collaboration with the Civic Memory Group, issued an open, free-to-enter request for ideas for a physical monument addressing the largest mass killing of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles history, an event that remained largely unacknowledged and fragmented for over 150 years.
Japan Past & Present (JPP) is a global information hub and digital repository created to promote research, teaching, and collaboration in Japanese humanities. The initiative provides and presents grant opportunities, digital projects, global networks, educational resources, student workshops, institutional partnerships, researcher directories, and translation databases.
Catching Up With Life is a year-long, institution-wide research investigation launched in March 2021 by the CCA, culminating in the exhibition A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention. The multi-platform investigation took place through distinct physical, digital, and broadcast channels including online editorials, live-streamed public programs, documentary filmmaking, audio podcasting, and social media pilots.
Book featuring spreads from Informational Affairs, the studio’s ongoing collection of found books. Produced for By the Books, an exhibition organized by AXAXAXA in Vevey, Switzerland.
Newsprint publication for Google Design featuring fifty books sourced from used bookstores across Los Angeles. Produced for SPAN 2016 Los Angeles as part of the studio’s ongoing Informational Affairs series, the selection reflects the city’s layered design culture through its printed matter. More info ⎘
Posters, postcards, and digital materials for the UCLA Design Media Arts MFA Lecture Series. A modular system of shapes and typography allows each poster to shift in tone, from abstract to technical, while maintaining a unified structure across the series.