Our small family at MOLD started 2021 with a fresh new website designed and developed by House of 207, our longtime collaborators and the design-build team responsible for our original website. Ushering in the new year with the intent to bridge our online and print presence, we worked with emerging artists to give shape to our editorial series and recurring columns. As we continue to seek QPOC artists whose body of work resonate with MOLD, we thought we’d share our process behind visualizing the themes of our editorial series including: Repast, Social Synergies, Degrowth, the Visuality of Mutuality, Urban Ecologies, and Required Reading, through the unique practices of our commissioned artists.
REPAST: BEYOND COTTAGE CORE
Artwork by Kristi Huynh
Our Repast series by Holly Eliza Temple tells the stories of cooks, designers and scientists throughout history to help us design better food futures. To pay homage to the iconic figures in Repast, our in-house designer paired vintage photograph frames with ASCII art to showcase and preserve each figure’s history and seminal contributions..
SOCIAL SYNERGIES: RESTAURANTS WITHOUT WALLS
Artwork by Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants
Social Synergies investigates the social structures – both seen and unseen – that underpin food production and consumption. We commissioned Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants to illustrate the themes of the collective vs the individual, Western dominator culture vs Eastern partnership model with Mother Earth, our post-COVID desires and new sustainable needs of food systems. In this illustration for “Restaurants Without Walls,” Sophi uses a whimsical visual language to focus on “reconnecting with the rhythm of nature.” In her illustration, people eat in a forest where ripe fruits are gifted from the trees.
DEGROWTH: DEGROWTH IN DEMAND
Artwork by Cynthia Alfonso
The Degrowth series explores how activists, farmers, and scholars have sought to create more resilient communities and food systems in rejection of the drive for infinite economic growth. Following our website relaunch in March, we commissioned designer and animator Cynthia Alfonso to create artwork for our new series and new landing page. Cynthia uses her striking geometric and minimalist style to visualize a brighter future ahead of us in alignment with a conversation between Lexie Smith and Jamie Tyberg about degrowth and decolonization.
THE VISUALITY OF MUTUALITY: GRAPHIC DESIGN AND LOCAL FOOD ECOLOGIES
Artwork by Companion-Platform
The Visuality of Mutuality is a column about the ways graphic design can help support local restaurants, establish deeper roots for food sovereignty, and nourish local food ecologies. For this column, we reached out to some of our favorite graphic designers, Lexi Visco and Calvin Rocchio of Companion-Platform. Together, they photographed a series of clean images that capture the ways artists, such as themselves, contribute to new models of mutual aid, locality and nourishment in the food world.
URBAN ECOLOGIES: CITIES AS REFUGIA FOR ECOSYSTEMS ADRIFT
Artwork by Ryan Carl
Urban Ecologies explores how the ever-evolving built environment affects the way we think about, grow, and eat food. We commissioned multidisciplinary designer and graphic artist Ryan Carl, whose diagrammatic, typographic, and abstract approach to image-making we resonate with. Ryan produced a series of abstract diagrams and graphs to examine the rapid environmental effects on our relationship to food.
REQUIRED READING: COMBAT LIBERALISM
Artwork by Lam Lo
Required Reading is a series that pairs original recipes with reflections on revolutionary texts. Longtime admirers of uou___cute’s soft and cute pastel illustration process, we asked Lam Lo to combine her unique aesthetic and fuzzy animal characters with Jamie Tyberg and Nate Cox’s steamed beet cake recipe, acorn lemonade recipe, and more.
