Sewell Killingstad on why making “art for art’s sake” lands you the briefs you love

If you managed to bag a ticket to Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo’s music festival this summer (lucky you!), then you’ll have seen multidisciplinary artist and designer Sewell Killingstad’s animated floral typography on virtually every poster and stage. Like a lot of the best projects and commissions, before this wonderfully delicate title work ended up as the backdrop to Rodrigo’s star-studded, all-women lineup, the idea for an animation first started out as something quite inconsequential. Sewell decided one day that they wanted to make an animation out of buttercups “because I kept seeing them on my walks during the day”, they tell us.

“So I took some home and scanned them in, and thought it would be fun to use them to make lettering as I did with clovers before. I made the animation in Photoshop, using some old photography of mine as the backdrop. I guess it attracted some cool people, because I got a DM from Jean Pierre Consuegra back in June asking if I would like to hop on a quick call for a project he thought I would be perfect for.” At the time the client was completely under wraps so it’s safe to say that Sewell was pretty stoked when the news came out: “you can see in real time my shock in the comments section of this post,” they say. “Then I saw it was used on the actual stages, which was absolutely insane. It felt really cool to know that just an idea I had randomly turned into something huge like that.”

Sewell’s ongoing collaboration with Vanilla Mace on the youtube star and twitch streamer’s merchandise has a similar start-up story. A few years back, the designer was working on some passion projects for fun. “One of them was fake Coachella merchandise for Clairo which, looking back, of course, is rough as hell, and I would change 100 things about, but people did really like the random scanned eBay lace design I made,” they say. The designer’s post caught Vanilla’s manager’s attention at the time, who reached out and asked Sewell to design some merchandise for the artist. “I did think it was a scam email for about a month until we actually video called,” they say. “I was so lucky to design her merchandise, and I have also repeatedly been honoured to keep designing her merchandise for the past year or so now for various events and drops.”

In the designer’s eyes, every dream brief has come from putting their work out there and “making things for the sake of making them”. It’s a sure path for the right people to find your work, even though it might not pay off instantly: “I don’t think there is a trick or cheat code to getting attention from ‘bigger’ names, or just cool clients in general; I think it really is a combination of luck or right place, right time, making good connections, being extremely annoying (never underestimate the power of a DM because I do it all the time), and also making sure you have your own independent voice as an artist.”