ΤHE GESTALT EFFECT, Works & Extensions of Designers United

Designers United, the Greek and European award winning design team founded by Dimitris Koliadimas and Dimitris Papazoglou, which undertook the design of major sporting events of world magnitude and numerous artistic and commercial events are presenting their works at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art from May 31 until July 31 2011.

Following the practices of visual research and systematic methodology implemented in their design work and their response to complex applied needs of visual communications, the exhibition goes beyond the framework put in a conventional presentation.

The exhibition of Designers United presents their work like a dance routine with multiple back and forth steps: the material is presented through multiple restructurings and reconstructions.

Parallel to the actual, final mastered projects, which could, as usual, be grouped into clear genre classifications (catalogues, posters, magazines, brochures, logotypes etc), Designers United choose a different way: to refer to their draft designs, their experimental research, the production steps, to isolate specific works and themes out of them, to explore their function within the context of contemporary visual culture, as well as the extensions given through different manipulations. In this context, the selected themes reveal the design origins and obsessions of the team, the creative mood of the designers which expands in space, the multiple dimensions of the design idea, their relationship with public space which is suggested both by the external visual and social environment and the museum site.

Publications, brochures, geometric or hybrid forms, materials of the printing process, extensions of the extensive design process, specific color palettes, messages, ambiguous images, high quality typographic applications, three-dimensional installations and personal experiences are presented at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art.

The "products" escape from their applicated uses, but not from their producers, who release them occasionally from the client's demands, either by production restrictions or pressure of the actual productive time, and sometimes restore them mentally into the environment of the outer world of stores, political rhetoric, cars, traffic noise, urban neon lighting.

Hence, the exhibition confirms that graphic design neither commences nor ends in designed materials. Through selected use of the image, format, typography, Designers United, as producers of modern "collective imagination", influenced by music, architecture, art, reinvent their work and its multiple facets within the world where this is produced and consumed.

If the theory of Gestalt, which has its origin in psychology, clearly expresses the key strategies of visual perception, then the exhibition of Designers United goes beyond that and in a sense tests the limits of the designers themselves, the nature of the design as well as the aspects of visual culture.

Produced by: Designers United, Curated by: Thouli Misirloglou (officeculture.eu), In collaboration with Infrared architects