ABC Diatype and ABC Monument Grotesk Mono in use by Zak Group:

Zak Group teamed up with Virgil Abloh to design ICONS, a new book that documents Abloh’s oeuvre at Nike and gives shape to a cultural history of sneakers.

In 2016, Nike and Virgil Abloh joined forces to create a sneaker collection celebrating ten of the Oregon-based company’s most iconic shoes. ICONS offers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes view into this industry-defining collaboration, bringing together all the greats — including Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1, and Air Presto.

The first part of the book catalogues a visual culture of sneakers and Abloh’s investigative, creative process through original text messages from Abloh to Nike designers and rare materials from the brand’s archives. We worked closely with Abloh to select never-before-seen prototypes and art direct a series of photographs by Sergiy Barchuk.

A lexicon in the second part defines the key people, places, objects, ideas and materials from which the project grew. Entries like ‘Marcel Duchamp’, ‘Illinois Institute of Technology’, ‘open source’ and ‘ready-made’ provide an evolving vocabulary underpinning the project. Texts by Nike’s Nicholas Schonberger, writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson, and Virgil Abloh with Emily Segal frame the collaborative work within fashion and design history.

The electric volt green cover features the original 1971 swoosh by designer Carolyn Davidson framed by Abloh’s addition SOMETHING’S OFF. An eight-page gatefold charts the entirety of Abloh’s prolific output including the original ten icons and the 50 designs released over the following three years.

Your Room Your Dreams is a book created to replace the fashion showcase of Paco Rabanne for Fall/Winter 2021. In these exceptional circumstances induced by the Covid crisis, the fashion industry had to rethink how to show their pieces once fashion events were severely restricted. Where some brands decided to utilize multimedia and made cinematic video showcases to broadcast on social media, and others organized events with a limited audience and augmented the experience with VR, Paco Rabanne chose to create a precious printed object, in order to bring back materiality in a period dominated by digital interactions.

Working closely with the label’s creative director Julien Dossena, the book was designed and art directed by Zak Group. The collection is a hymn to decadence: it shows a subversive bourgeois style in a domestic setting, where the different patterns of wallpapers and clothes interlace to create heave-cluttered images. The position Zak Group decided to adopt for the treatment of the photographs is to play on cinematography. That’s why the motion studies of Muybridge became the main inspiration for the book. The montage of photographs taken in a few seconds of time looks like stills from a movie of the 1950s, and the diffraction of some scenes sheds light on the multiplicity of viewpoints present in a movie.

The book is bound in olive cloth, and gold-embossed with Cardinal Fruit from Production Type. Cardinal was designed with the idea of a synthetic organism, a typographic equivalent of the android: put in relationship with the highly artificial setting for the photographs, the type reinforces the idea of a sophistication that becomes decadent by being pushed to its limits. The sans serif used on the spine and elsewhere is Paco Rabanne’s custom Paco Sans, designed in 2015 by Radim Peško for the new identity by Zak Group.

Syndicat Grotesk in use by Zak Group's team for the communication of a Bruce Nauman exhibition held at at Palazzo Grassi. From Zak Group:

On the occasion of Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies at Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Zak Group designed the exhibition campaign and two-volume catalogue following the invitation of curators Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois. The show includes a comprehensive survey of the US artist’s practice spanning from the 1960s until today and centers on a series of videos revisiting the original Walk with Contrapposto from 1968.

The museum logo and running texts use Univers.

Syndicat Grotesk is the typeface family used for the redesigned Fact magazine, both on their website and in the print issues.

From Zak Group:

From Zak Group:

For Albert Oehlen’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Zak Group has designed a slender, unbound artist book that functions as an extension of the display. The John Graham Remix is a series of works dating from the 1980s until today, in which the artist reshuffles elements from Graham’s Tramonto Spaventoso (1940-49) in the tradition of abstract and surrealist painting. As the centerpiece of the exhibition, Oehlen created a site-specific installation of large-scale paintings, turning the domed heart of the gallery into a reinterpretation of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

In the catalogue, full-bleed reproductions of paintings and charcoal drawings are compiled into a bundle of large-format sheets to mirror Oehlen’s layered display. These matt-coated spreads are held together by a clear acetate cover screen-printed with a drawing made especially for the artists book. The title is featured on the cover and repeated on the poly bag enclosing the publication.

Lausanne 400 (by Nizar Kazan) is used throughout.

Zak Group:

The third edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale—titled Close, Closer—considered the condition in which architecture is practiced and the way it is framed, expressed and understood today. We were invited by the chief curator Beatrice Galilee to contribute a visual identity and took an investigative approach by seeking ways for the public to be the generative force in the visual identity of the Triennale. Despite the lack of a singular logo, Close, Closer was given a strong and coherent form through the embrace of striking typography and bold colour that presented the responses in print material and public spaces throughout the city of Lisbon, sourced from the website we designed for the Triennale.

Zak Group:

As an ongoing part of our art direction for Fridericianum, we have created unique designs for each of the museum’s exhibitions during the tenure of director Susanne Pfeffer. Developed in close collaboration with the curators and artists, the resulting postcards, pamphlets and catalogues are a response to the specific concerns and aesthetic qualities of each show.

“We designed the artist’s book accompanying Ed Atkins’ solo exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Known for his work employing High Definition video and sound, Atkins conceived a new text for the book, titled A Seer Reader, accompanied by marginalia-esque line drawings by the artist. In an afterword, Mike Sperlinger described the artist’s writings as ‘breath[ing] a vocabulary of distension, tumescence, inflation [...] in an immoderate, immodest way.’ The format of A Seer Reader references mass-produced pulp-fiction paperbacks from the 1970–90s.” — Zak Group