The 28-year-old graphic designer Kostya Sasquatch makes thick, vector-like graphics on a PC, all cartoon colors and geometric shapes, odd logotypes that create iconographies for systems that seem to exist only in the designer’s mind. (He has a whole series called Donut Control.) They’re the kind of designs that could be from anywhere, but they might not have looked anything like they do if Sasquatch wasn’t from Moscow. His work is influenced by street culture and science: The first, he says, doesn’t exist authentically in Russia — only as a copy of its American or European counterparts, as filtered through the internet — and the second is almost second nature to Sasquatch, considering he was raised in post-Sputnik Soviet Russia at the tail end of the Cold War. His childhood was spent watching movies like Flight of the Navigator, drawing scenes from War of the Worlds, peering through microscopes, and growing crystals.
But his native country’s greatest influence may be the artistic freedom it’s granted him: “At the moment, I work only with friends or friends of friends, because my style is a little bit specific for Russia. People often tell me, ‘That’s cool, but we can’t sell it,’ or something like that.” Another problem in Moscow: Personal taste. “There are people who know art and design but have no money to pay for it, and there are people with lots of money who don’t know art. There are serious businessmen who honestly don’t understand why they should pay someone who just makes logotypes or graphic design. So I end up making a lot of stuff for my own pleasure.”
What inspires your work?
“I get inspiration reading Wikipedia or browsing ffffound.com. I enjoy classic graphic design of the ’60s–’80s, before computers. I’m inspired by native and folk art, logotypes, and all kind of signs — any examples of ideas expressed in very simple but exact forms. But usually inspiration comes from sudden sights in the street or nature, which is beyond words I suppose.”
Favorite shop:
“EBay. My favorite searches are for meteorites, prisms, and self-made things like wood carvings and decorative figures. But I usually find the loveliest things when I’m looking for something else, which is why I like it.”
Piece you wish you’d made: “I wish I would I finally make those pieces that are still just ideas in my mind.”
Style movement you most identify with: “Every good artist forms his own independent movement and at the same time all artists are participants in one fundamental unity. I believe there’s some kind of universal language that each of us can speak and understand in some way. Style is part of this complicated system. Style is a medium between us.”
Album most played while you work: “Us” by Peter Gabriel
Fictional character who would own your work:
“Woody Woodpecker.”
What a stranger who saw your work for the first time would say: “I wish I could know.”
Inspiration behind your Hex Series: “I’ve been obsessed with crystals and polygonal structures since growing crystals in a can with a blue vitriol solution and making hexaflexagons as a child. Although the geometry that was taught at school seemed boring to me.”
Favorite material to work with: “Paper and Koh-I-Noor Versatil 5205 mechanical pencils. I mostly draw on a PC, but still I enjoy hand drawing a lot.”
What inspired you to be an artist? “When I was eight or nine years old, I used to visit a local children’s studio where kids were supposed to study the basics of classical drawing. But the teacher thought that I was gifted, so rather than drawing still-lifes and landscapes, I was allowed to draw UFOs, dinosaur battles, monster flowers, aliens, spiders, and tripods from War of the Worlds (pictured) burning down buildings. I also was allowed to draw with my hands and to use any materials I wanted. I already considered myself an artist by that time, but it was very inspiring and maybe that experience helped me to choose my way.”
First thing you ever made: “A drawing called Evil Mole. I made it when I was four. The interesting thing about this drawing is that I think some of the lines with symbols look like Scandinavian runes.”
Place you go to be inspired: “Moscow’s Orlov Paleontology Museum has these gigantic skeletons and lots of super ancient stuff. There’s also something like a mine shaft with a mirrored floor and ceiling, so that when you look inside, it looks like eternity.”
Item you keep around the house for inspiration: “Different science-related things that let you observe the fundamental laws of physics in everyday life, like prisms, optics, microscopes, meteorites, and telescopes. I also love old books and stones, branches, and pieces of wood — the stuff you might find in the forest or on the seashore.”
Design or art hero: “Anyone who does what he thinks is needed to be done — whether it’s in art, fashion, or design — is rather a hero.”
Last great exhibition you saw: “Faces & Laces, a streetwear and music exhibition in Moscow. It reminded me a medieval fair. It took place at the Kosmos exhibition hall at the VDNkH complex (the Exhibition of Economic Achievement in English), which is a gigantic long building with an enormous dome. There were a lot of drunk people, kiosks and tables with different stuff you could buy, and skaters riding over the decks to Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In the Sky.’”
Favorite design object: “It changes so frequently, but for the last few weeks it’s been the Trooper headphones by Nixon. I just like the shape. It’s not simple, but it’s still very clear and they don’t look like your usual headphones.”
Thing you love most about Moscow: “Solitary places where nature absorbs the signs of human life. Abandoned parks with self-made houses of the homeless. Islands of wild nature inside the city.”
Thing you hate most about it: “Climate! Also my neighbors, and the absence of bicycle lanes and parking lots. I’m not very happy with the local social and political system as well. But climate first.”
Describe a color memory: “My father worked at an R&D institute for physical training, located in a 19th-century building. They were supposed to be doing research related to sport and training technologies, but they also made some strange stuff. Once I saw a 5-foot circle that had keys on it like a piano. They were large enough to push with your feet, and when you pushed it, it shone with different color lights and made a sound like a synthesizer, so you could play a melody by stepping from one key to another. I can’t guess how it was connected to sport.”
Project you’re most proud of: “The first is a web store I made for myself where I sell toy cameras, jewelry, and designer toys. It’s called Marushimaru after the Japanese spelling of marshmallow. The other is an identity for my wife, the fashion designer Lisa Shahno.” (Her work is pictured above). “It included a website, logo, postcards, and video-art for her presentation at a local store. I prefer working for myself because I can make everything exactly as I think it should be.”
Right now, Kostya Sasquatch is: “Looking forward to meeting his beloved in Berlin this May.”
Someone like JP Williams has enjoyed plenty of validating moments in his 20-year career as a graphic designer: Getting to study under one of his design heros, Paul Rand, at Yale; winning more than 100 awards for projects like his kraft-paper tea packages for Takashimaya; discovering that his collection of baseball cards from 1909 was worth enough to buy his wife and business partner Allison an engagement ring. All well and good, however none of it really compared, he admits, to the feeling of being validated by Martha Stewart.
Ah, the impotence of the urban dweller. Ever since the Best Made Company axe debuted this spring, you’d be hard-pressed to find a New Yorker who isn’t dying to snap open that wooden case and heave the Tennessee hickory–handled thing at… well, what, exactly? “At first I thought a lot of New Yorkers would buy them,” says Peter Buchanan-Smith, the New York–based graphic designer who founded the company along with his childhood pal Graeme Cameron. But it turns out the best audience for an axe — even one with a handle saturated in gorgeous shades of spray paint — is a person who actually might use an axe.
The editors of Neuland, a recent compendium of up-and-coming German graphic designers, struggled with all the usual big, philosophical questions while putting their book together: What is German design? What is German? Who cares? If they were Ellen Lupton or Steven Heller, they might have spent pages upon pages ruminating on these issues. Instead, they did what any editors who are actually designers by trade might do — they asked their 51 subjects for the answers.
