...mailing list, international magazines and link portals. The Stereohype range includes the growing and popular button badge collection with its annually added design competition winners and the frequently added B.I.O. (by invitation only) button badge series. April 2005 saw the studio move across town to a much larger space in Central London, Clerkenwell. To mark this new era a FL@33 monograph was published in May 2005 as part of the highly collectable 'design&designer' series by French Pyramyd Editions (bi-lingual: English and French; book collection number 33!).
___ Postcard is the very first major publication conceived, compiled, written and designed by Agathe Jacquillat and Tomi Vollauschek at FL@33. The book features on 224 pages over 800 hand-picked postcards and postcard-related projects by over 130 artists, illustrators, photographers, designers, studios and collectives from all around the world, with emerging talents sitting alongside established artists. The English edition of Postcard will be released in September 2008 by Laurence King Publishing in the UK and by Chronicle Books in the USA. At the same time several foreign language editions will also be released by their international partner publishers (French, Pyramyd Editions, German, DuMont – Literatur and Kunstverlag and in Spanish by Gustavo Gili).

...eight months or so after we set up FL@33 – to create three seasonal Brochure covers and images for posters, brochure dividers and leaflet covers for the Royal Festival Hall Classical Music campaign 2002/03. Their Art Director of the in-house design studio saw our self-initiated, self-published Architecture, Art and Design publication Trans-form magazine.
___ Trans-form is a multi-media celebration with a large scale magazine, an attached cd-rom 'trans-it' and the website trans-port.org. Trans-form celebrates the beauty of tower cranes which appear and disappear in our cities. We treated the tower cranes as pieces of art, sculptures really. We interviewed crane operators 30 metres above ground (with our heads in the sky) and created and animated crawling cityscape insects with tower crane legs. The publication includes photography, photo-montages, line drawings, typography, animations and lots of information on how tower cranes work, etc.
___ So all this was presented by the Royal Festival Hall's Art Director to their marketing department who needed to be convinced that people who can make tower cranes look exciting and beautiful could do the same to promote classical music... We were really excited about this commission. Not only did a big client approach us for the first time because they saw another FL@33 project but we could also work in a way we wanted to.
___ Agathe and I were responsible for taking pictures of bizarre medieval instruments with real-time explanations by their owner, all kinds of musicians in action and the design itself - the creation of surreal, intriguing and inviting imagery. The images were – as already mentioned above – created in a ping-pong fashion were Agathe would start a composition, I would then add elements and Agathe would finish it after a few back-and-forths - or the other way around.
|10| What are some of the things that you do to keep yourself creative?
T: Agathe and I regularly collaborate with book / magazine publishers and designers around the world if we find a particular subject intriguing. Self-initiated and/or non-commercial projects have therefore always played an important role and generally inform our commissioned work.
A + T: Non-work related: we spend as much time as possible with our kids – they certainly help us put things into perspective and are a huge inspiration. Holidays and any kind of temporary change in location are also very welcome. Always great to come home though...
|11| Who is your idol inspiration that influences you this long?
A + T: We have an endless list of people who have continuously surprised or intrigued us one way or another. The word 'idol' is certainly too strong a word – I don't think we have any – but the word inspiration works for us. Ray and Charles Eames (the best lounge chair ever), László Moholy-Nagy (for his Licht-Raum-Modulator), André Breton, Vaughan Oliver, Gert Dumbar, Monty Python,...
|12| Last (book / film / song) you (read / watched / heard)...
Book: Blink – The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, the follow-up from the equally fascinating The Tipping Point. Reading it for a months now and hope to find time to finally finish it soon.
Movie: Control.
Music: PJ Harvey The Mountain from her brilliant album White Chalk (2007).
|13| What are things that you (love/hate) about your country?
A: My German is quite frankly catastrophic - so Berlin for instance is currently out of the question and Tomi's French is not good enough yet to even think about moving to Paris. Our common language is English, London is where we met and set up our studio and we simply love to live and work in this multi-cultural, vibrant metropolis. We found plenty of delicatessen shops around town to cover our needs for 'food from home'. It's very sad of course that we both had to leave so many old friends and our families behind. They hopefully come quite often and visit us and we can leave the island quite easily too and reach mainland europe within a few hours via Eurostar (as train passenger), Eurotunnel (train by car), plane or theoretically using fairies.
|14| If you transform as a colour, what do you want to be and why?
A: I know not really a colour as such but it's white.
T: Probably a very common answer for designers but it has to be black – absorbing everything bright you know... 8)
|15| Imagine your 20-years-to-come life, what do you see?
T: 20 years is of course impossible to predict. 5 years are difficult enough. Anyway – we will probably continue for some time to create books with our trusted publisher Laurence King. We are aiming to expand FL@33 while maintaining a healthy balance of work across all media. We simply love to be able to satisfy our clients (and our own) needs to provide them with the full package including visual identities, books and posters, T-shirts, badges and postcards, installations, websites and animations, etc. Anything really from custom typefaces to art directing publications. Since all this is our passion we will probably still be doing this in many years to come.
|16| If you could reincarnate, who or what do you want to be?
T: We are doing just fine as humans, male and female respectively.
|17| What will you say if you meet someone who plagiarized your artwork(s)?
A: Not sure whether we have met anybody personally yet. Unfortunately there would theoretically be quite a few we could bump into. There would probably be not much to talk about though. These people know who they are and they do already have to live with the guilt (if they do indeed have a conscience at all) – nothing else to add really to this dreadful matter...
|18| Three things you hate are...
A: Aggression, stupidity, sauerkraut.
T: Ignorance, pessimism, juicy raisins.