We, Ourselves, and Us

Are our clients present when it comes to the choices we make about our own professional identity? How do our work environments, specialist skills, and current trends factor in the design of these identities? How are we invested and investing in professional identity, and who do we try to attract when we design the simple but elegant business card in black and white or a colorful plastic card (evoking the chips used as payment for rides at the funfair)? What drives us to design a covetable print on a t-shirt or an expressive greeting card? The material collected in the open call suggests that many of us still take great pleasure in designing objects for our own professional identity. Browsing through these objects, we might encounter familiar names while also discovering professional identities that are new to us.

In the exhibition set-up, sleek professional identity design alternates with visuals of a more personal nature. This eclectic mix is a testimony to the narrowing gap between personal and professional identity in late capitalism. Is self-representational printed matter still relevant in an age when designers are reaching bigger and more diverse audiences online? Will this collection soon become another archive which reminds us of past practices? Or do the tactile nature and playful designs gathered in the exhibition make a unique case for preserving important parts of contemporary identity design?