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.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art houses the largest museum collection in the western United States. The new online platform comprises of a cleanly rebuilt data endpoint paired with a restrained interface design that gives nuanced object records common structure while preserving distinctions in attribution, dating, and depth of scholarship.
Expanded from our previous work on Carnegie Museum of Art’s online catalogue, the collections website opens us closer study of the collection by connecting individual works with group records, exhibition histories, and associated texts. The collection’s development is more readily traced through museum programs including it’s growth through the Carnegie International, North America's longest-running recurring exhibition of international contemporary art.
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.
The 1871 Memorial Project supports the construction of a physical memorial near the Chinese American Museum to honor the victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre. The project comes out of an open call from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung’s design centers around guardian banyan trees in Sze Yup (四邑) where the first waves of Chinese immigrants to the United States originate.
Gallery 98 is an active online archive for curator Marc H. Miller’s collection of arts ephemera from the 1960s–1990s, centered around his long involvement in the New York art world. The collection catalogs thousands of items across announcement cards, posters, and publications connected through artists, galleries, nightclubs, and themes, while retaining the hand-built nature of Miller’s practice.
The Carnegie Museum of Art is the first museum in the United States dedicated to collecting art of its times. In other words, it’s the first museum dedicated to contemporary art. The website features an expressive typography forward approach which maintains its legibility through a robust and modular design system, and is reflected in its data model and backend user experience.
The Design Media Arts program at UCLA has led the field in computational art and design since the 1990s, shaping how artists use and think about emerging technologies. The website highlights student and alumni activity while supporting department operations and acting as a repository for its lectures and programming.
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.
Japan Story is an academic research platform and course at Harvard GSD originating from a series of intense, high-profile symposiums and interdisciplinary panel discussions centered around urbanization and the future of the city. The project follows distinct threads of pedagogy, conversations, drawings, translated texts, literature, visual culture, critical essays, and music.
dublab is the pioneering, non-profit community radio station and cultural institution in Los Angeles founded in 1999. Future Roots Radio connects music of the past as the foundation for today, and today’s music as the roots of tomorrow. The website is an internet checkpoint in LA featuring live broadcasts and the foundation‘s broadcast archive in full.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s special “Elements” issue is themed around the 150th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table—using it as a lens through which to examine supply chain vulnerabilities, national security, climate change, and the physical limits of the digital age. Stories feature Apple, Boeing, De Beers, Green Science Policy Institute, Greenland Minerals Ltd., Helium One, Jacobsen Salt Co., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and many more.
X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, the longest running LA art journal, ended its run in Spring 2024 after 26 years of publishing. The website houses a complete catalog of essays, reviews, interviews, and artist projects into a reading environment organized by issue, contributor, and series. Built to support ongoing publishing alongside the back catalogue, it continues as a free archive following the journal’s closure.
Ghostly International is a pioneering American independent record label and art company founded in 1999, merging boundary-pushing music with museum-grade graphic design and curated objects. The website is a full-featured web store and online archive, documenting it’s historic run and broad influence across genres.
Online feature for Bloomberg Businessweek visualizing the global supply chain behind Apple’s iPhone. Illustrates where materials originate, how they’re assembled, and the economic systems that sustain their production. Read online ⎘
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.
Interactive documentary directed by Grace Lee exploring the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. The website presents interviews, archival footage, and news coverage through an open structure that allows viewers to navigate overlapping perspectives across the city’s communities. Awards: 11th Macau Design Biennial, 2018. Watch online ⎘
Website for East of Borneo, a collaborative online magazine dedicated to contemporary art and its history in Los Angeles. Hosts essays, interviews, and an open-access archive of images and documents contributed by the public. Visit site ⎘
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 ⎘
Interactive project for Red Bull Music Academy created in collaboration with ten electronic artists. Features tracks built from mixable stems that shift in tempo and mood, paired with public-domain footage reflecting the emotional range of each composition.
Pulling from a bank of over 700 carefully curated images including album covers, found footage, and original content, Endless 80s NYC explores ten of the most influential New York record labels from the 80s and pays homage to the vibrant energy and blending of cultures that took place in the city during that decade. Awards: 11th Macau Design Biennial, 2018.
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.
Website for X-TRA, the Los Angeles–based contemporary art quarterly. Hosts an eighteen-year archive of print issues, reviews, and artist writings. The site was later redesigned by the studio in 2018.
