Shelby De Fazio’s experimental designs balance chaos with refinement

When describing her style, Melbourne-based graphic designer Shelby De Fazio says: “I’m interested in the bridge between kitsch or chaotic and the refined and impactful in my design outcomes” – and the creative’s practice might just sit right in the middle of the two.

Surrounded by the music scene, the designer spends a lot of her time creating album artwork, merchandise and promotional posters for musicians and bands, or making music herself. In this corner of the industry, she’s found a “creative crossover of mapping a visual narrative to music” that she loves, collaborating with artists and having the freedom to “dive into their conceptual directions” in new and creative ways.

Shelby’s background in communication design with a further study of typography is quite ironically the thing that she says pushes her to “challenge the constraints, legibility and expectations of design”, rather than mould to any tight typographic traditions in her work. Her practice is driven by a sense of playfulness that “celebrates tactile visual engagement”, she shares. So, the designer finds a range of techniques useful for the creation of her layered, collaged graphic design work, frequently mingling analogue and digital methods.

Forever collecting printed ephemera for inspiration, Shelby’s scanner is a close friend in her studio. It’s a tool for reworking handmade marks, or taking found objects to “create or skew type or lettering both by hand and digitally”. This found ephemera can be anything from “tickets, flyers, signage, stationary, packaging”, she says. “A trip to the asian grocer or my local second hand bookstore always sparks inspiration offering a rich array of colour and typography.”