“The more, the weirder, the better”: Csenge Csató on unlearning everything she was taught about typography

Csenge Csató has been doing a lot of pencil drawings recently, and, through this, she’s finally found her distinctive illustration style: a “semi-abstract, sci-fi tinted imagery”. A member of the music scene in her home of Budapest, the DJ’s illustration and design work is often connected to the world of sound, creating many posters, flyers and album for numerous personal commissions. Many of these funky, noisy designs though are coming out of her alternative club nights: Morph, which she organises alongside good friends — just one of the many creative endeavours inspired by “the ton of music” she listens to per day.

To create her collage worlds, interestingly, the designer makes use of scans from scientific books, “these can be either illustrations or sometimes discoloured photographs”, she explains. This is a sort of continuation of her early 2010s Tumblr activity where the designer “reposted a lot of vintage Japanese posters and comic snippets”, often then provided the starting point for her works.

Csenge likes to intercept her array of cut out images with digital doodles, she revels in the contrast this creates between the rawness of her aged vintage images and the vivid colours of her repetitive squiggles. “I always like to repeat simple motifs to put some calm on an otherwise chaotic and noisy collaged picture,” she says. “You might not see the system, but I do!”. For the most part, the designer has steered clear of a lot of the rules and systems of composition that she was taught at university. On the subject of typography in her work she says: “I try to unlearn everything that they taught me about font usage: The more, the weirder, the better.”