Louise Borinski invites you to decode and deconstruct her cryptic typeface

Thread of Inspiration is a series in partnership with Pinterest which explores how inspiration can come from unexpected places. Throughout the year we’ll be inviting a host of creatives to create amazing artworks, and sharing the intriguing stories behind how they come up with new ideas. Every other month a new creative will be introduced, tasked with creating new works inspired by the artist who came before them in the chain.

Berlin-based graphic designer Louise Borinski tends to always start her work with a wide range of visual references. Although the final outcome is usually refined – both in concept, colour palette and design – she starts a project with her plate absolutely full, arranging it together and chopping parts away when they don’t quite fit.

It was this approach that first attracted us to Louise for the next leg of our Thread of Inspiration project, a series of works developed through research and inspired by a different creative who came before them in a chain stretching across the year. We’re now on the third run of this creative relay race – first, a talk by Ricardo Bessa at Nicer Tuesdays inspired Maaike Canne to create a series of futuristic illustrations, which then inspired photographer Puzzleman Leung to create a set of mysterious photographic explorations, and Louise has now morphed this project into a graphic design-leaning one.

Taking us through this long journey, Louise points out a few objects that provided turning points in the project’s development. At the more sculptural end is an object by designer Dan Friedman, taken from his book The Radical Modernist. A decorative bowl structure with elongated looping handles, “the way lines and shapes are balanced caught me directly,” says Louise. Next, introducing the idea of a cryptic alphabet more visually was a work by Pablo Picasso titled Start Constellation, a piece in which Louise “could already see a cryptic alphabet”. Introducing colour and a possible texture is then a piece by the artist Daisuke Yokota, which is “very inspiring for its range of colours and its materiality (this almost chrome look) which I later applied to the typography,” describes Louise.

At this point, the research phase of the designer’s project jumped back to looking at sculptural works, when she stumbled across the works of Mike Goodlet, which “inspired me because of its simple but very organic shapes,” she tells us. Flitting back to more typographic works, Louise then got the urge to begin the project after delving deeper into movements such as hyphergraphy (a mathematics term where the edge of a graph can join numerous vertices), and lettrism (the French avant-garde movement established by Isidore Isou in 1940s Paris), both offering examples of “letters and symbols as a dominant form in a piece of art”. This – coupled with a more contemporary reference in Kobayashi Ikki’s work, who “inspired me through his very accurate but simple way of drawing shapes” – meant the project was ready to begin its making phase.

With the typeface then completed in all its tubular glory, to tie each variation shown across her final posters a tight colour palette was needed. Turning to what has become a trusted friend of many a graphic designer, Louise opened up her copy of A Dictionary of Colour Combinations (first developed by Sanzo Wada) to develop a colour series which could bleed from one poster’s background to the next. Largely looking at a section of the book in which possible colour combinations are presented in groups of three, the designer used these suggestions as jumping-off points, noting how “I didn’t use the exact colour codes, but I loved how unusual some of the combinations are,” she says. “I picked out a few of them and rearranged them so I would have a full colour palette,” presenting a rainbow of metallic greens, pinks, blues and purples.

Taking care to ensure a thread could be found between the final pieces, Louise adds that now “I am very happy that I completed a series of seven posters,” she says. “It’s not so easy to not repeat yourself,” but by ensuring that different statements were displayed on each poster to showcase the typeface’s many forms, a carefully constructed colour palette to differ one from another, and let’s not forget a vast range of references to begin with, a unique series of artworks developed.

Now passing over the project to the next creative contributor, Louise only hopes that they’ll be able to find as much room for experimentation and research as she was granted with Puzzleman’s works a few weeks ago. “I hope the next creative will find a little seed in my work,” she adds, “and grow something completely different out of it.”