Rational Beauty’s editorial design for Pan and the Dream, Issue no. 3, Trip to the Moon.
Jeanette Abbink
Jeanette Abbink is a graphic and editorial designer who recently relocated from Brooklyn, New York, to Austin, Texas. Under the auspices of her studio, Rational Beauty, she has created award-winning editorial design for such magazines as Dwell (where she was the founding creative director), American Craft, and Pan and the Dream, and books for publishers including Rizzoli, Aperture, Abrams, Monacelli, and Clarkson Potter (where Questlove’s Something to Food About: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs, won an AIGA Fifty Books of the Year Award). She has also taught publication design at Parsons School of Design, The New School, for several years and looks forward to teaching at the School of Design and Creative Technologies, University of Texas at Austin. The Rational Beauty collaboration is the first art print by the award-winning graphic and editorial designer.
Tyler Owens is a graphic designer from Phoenix, Arizona. Tyler currently works as a designer for a small graphic design agency in Brooklyn, NY. His approach to design is to make work that is quiet, thoughtful, and specific. Tyler came to meet Jeanette after seeing her studio’s conception for the art book SuperDesign:Italian Radical Design, and emailing her to tell her how much he enjoyed her work.
Tyler Owens | Design Assistant
Q & A with Jeanette Abbink of Rational Beauty
Mojave Art : What creative discoveries did you have during our collaboration, when creating the design for the prints?
Jeanette Abbink : What we learned is that achieving something beautiful and seemingly simple can actually be the most challenging and complicated endeavor. We adopted “Mojave Art” as inspiration and decided to traverse the desert landscape for our posters. After a period of exploration, we settled on the prickly pear cactus. Tyler, who was living in Arizona, soaked up the surrounding desert scenery, and as I strolled around Austin’s many neighborhoods during the pandemic’s shelter-in-place mandates, the prickly pear cactus became a familiar friend. The two of us shared photographs of our forays on a regular basis.
We found additional direction in the graphic work of German designer and typographer Otl Aicher and Italian modernist artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari. We both admire Aicher’s illustrations and pictograms—particularly those associated with the identity work his studio created for the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. And we are delighted by “La Pera” and “La Mela”, a series of silkscreen posters that Mari created for Danese Milano in the early 1960s.
Both Aicher and Mari take a stylized and simplified graphic approach that amps up the visual impact of their work. In particular, we were drawn to the volumetric presence achieved through solid shades in Mari’s drawings and the way Aicher reduces reduces drawings to black and white lines.
Collaboration Inspiration : Otl Aicher, Enzo Mari, and desert flora found in Arizona and Texas
Mojave Art : What graphic designer or creative has influenced your creative process and aesthetic the most?
Jeanette Abbink : The Bauhaus manifesto from 1919 has had an outsized impact on my work. I review the principles from time to time, and—decades later—some of their declarations continue to inspire me.
There are so many people who inspire my design practice. To name a few: Swiss Graphic Designers Armin Hoffman and Wolfgang Weingart, Artists Sheila Hicks and Agnes Martin, composers John Cage and Meredith Monk. And let’s not forget Julia Childs.
“Desert Flora And Fauna Get Broken Down To Their Graphic Essentials In This Artistic Endeavor”
In the Press | Mojave Art and Rational Beauty Collaboration: Aspire Design + Home & NY Mag’s Curbed.