Soup is challenging the notion that graphic design is anything but three-dimensional

After several years of collaborating on creative projects, Simon Wilson and Nina Jua Klein decided to make working together more official and founded the London-based design and development studio Soup, last year. Joined by designer Latifa Powell, the trio are working across print, digital, and spatial design projects with a wonderful range of expertise: “while many of our design interests overlap, we all have our own specialisms”, says Nina. Coming from a graphic design background, Simon has a keen interest in coding and web design, whilst Nina enjoys “more physical and experimental processes and outcomes”. With their practices now merged under Soup their output “tends to sit somewhere at this intersection between the physical and the digital”, Nina tells us.

Why soup? (We were wondering too). After weeks of deliberation over a studio name, in search of something “not too serious”, the pair landed on Eternal Soup over a (casual) lunch break chat about medieval broths. “Anyone who took some of these broths from the cauldron would top it up with new ingredients, so the flavours inevitably shifted and developed over time. A fitting metaphor for a studio we thought. Only Simon couldn’t remember what it was called and named it an ‘Eternal Soup’ [...] We joked that we should call our studio Eternal Soup and then somehow it stuck, day-to-day we just go by Soup however”, Nina explains.

Working for a range of cultural clients, developing its design flavours along the way, Soup have crafted exhibition identities for the likes of the V&A, Southbank Centre, Turner Contemporary and the Hayward Gallery. “We really enjoy working with cultural institutions and galleries, as they tend to be projects that combine our love for printed, spatial and digital outputs and allow us to realise our vision of bringing together these different disciplines into one thoughtful and coherent outcome”, says Simon. Often straying into 3D contexts when designing its exhibitions and installations, the studios approach challenges “the notion that graphic design is anything but three-dimensional”, as they play with spaces and experiences in inventive and surprising ways.