Reporting by Christina Beard
Designers typically don't reveal their mistakes or share how they stumbled into a solution. But Alex Lin of Studio Lin did last week at his AIGANY talk hosted at the Museum of Art and Design. Through a series of Do's and Don'ts, Lin revealed some of his successes and failures in design, production and fabrication. Some of his most beautiful work was created when he had no idea what he was doing or through collaborations.
After graduating from the Yale MFA graphic design program Lin worked at 2x4 for 6 years before co-founding DEFAULT. A few years later he parted ways and created Studio Lin—a studio founded on a desire to explore new territory through challenging collaborations with creative visionaries in the fields of architecture, industrial design, art and fashion. In just a few years Studio Lin has created a body of work that provokes and inspires the design community.
Lin challenged the audience to get in over your head and take on more than you can handle. While at 2x4, he took on way more than he could handle, by totally jumping into projects and working long hours and weekends. Lin was unsure how to start a project designing environmental graphics for the student campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Feeling overwhelmed, he started to create simple pictograms of 'things students do.' Hundreds of pictograms he created were later transformed into 20-foot tall, vinyl portraits of Mies van der Rohe, welcoming the students as they entered the building. He confessed that he had no idea where he was headed.
