The metallic graphics of Jump Jirakaweekul are rooted in the ancient but feel sharp and current

New York City-based designer Jump Jirakaweekul, who’s worked frequently with Collins (particularly on carving Twitch’s branding identity), focuses on image making as a form of building “intrinsic gestalts”. Gestalts meaning an organised whole, more than the sum of its parts. Sitting between graphic design and illustration, Jump uses design structure to build “fluid imagery”, and then uses illustration to proclaim something in the way “a mark or symbol would”. In short, there’s a tension between graphic communication and art and he’s interested in straddling the place where structure and personal expression overlap. He wants it both ways: his work should look and feel like a poster and a painting.

Sometimes he veers towards the dramatic with imps, gargoyles and mischievous figures of mythology. Inspired by sci-fi illustrators like Ian Miller or 90s underground rave flyers, his sharp visual language looks like a tattoo flash card embossed in metal or encased in concrete. His arsenal of symbols always carry the immediacy of a weapon – barbed wire, horned tails, monolithic blocks or spiky rock formations. In the same image, he juxtaposes a CCTV camera with a dragon with a huge scythe-like wing, creating a relationship between the inanimate and animate, organic and synthetic. In a few ways, Jump’s work evokes Shi Jinson’s 2006 series Na Zha Baby Boutique.

“A lot of my work is done digitally, using vector tools – it’s defining and refining form, building the overarching structure and following it through, sometimes creating design systems and grid structures for a component,” says Jump. His work is rooted in direct images – arrows, flares, spirals, whiplashing curves. Other times, it’s influenced by signage, symbols written into the pavement, highway graphics which are designed to shorthand communicate imperative language. Simple and effective, these shapes become the forms that hold some of Jump’s own symbology, inspired by existing symbols and glyphs. The goal is to create something that declares something through “word and image at the same time, forming new meaning through both”. For Jump, a quote by Sophie Taeuber-Arpe is integral to his practice: “The intrinsic decorative urge should not be eradicated. It is one of humankind’s deep-rooted, primordial urges.”