less'n'more & next product catalogues
 

visual storytelling and illustration
client: less'n'more, milch + honig designkultur (art direction)

14 illustrative storylines for two different product lines, using two completely different original and ad-hoc developed illustration styles.

DESCRIPTION:

Less'n'more is a manufacture of designer lamps in Cologne, Germany. Their production consists of two collections, less'n'more and Next.  

The client needed new, eye-catching, high-end product catalogues that would showcase the artistry and top-quality craftsmanship of each lamp.

CHALLENGE:

Conceive several storytelling lines and illustrate them with a custom-developed illustration style.

While entertaining, the storylines and the illustration should loosely and creatively highlight each product's USP.

Align clients´ and art director´s expectations in my output and deliver solutions that meet both.

MY APPROACH:

• Team / client kick-off briefing workshop with creative directors Thomas & Martin Poschauko.
• Research phase to gain understanding for the products, their technical features and client´s values and philosophy.
• Look & Feel illustrations, to develop a custom illustrative language.
• Conception of coherent, entertaining and yet informative visual storylines to bring awareness the products' features.
  
• Finalisation working closely with art director and designer.
  

kick-off workshop

A full-immersion briefing & bainstorming day with client and art director Christina Krois, guided by designers Thomas und Martin Poschauko, kicked off the creative work on this project.

Less'n'more founders Kai Steffens and Christian Dinow shared their vision and showed us their lamps and their features, which were to be a the core of the illustrations.

less'n'more serie

The lamps in the Less'n'More series have interchangeable parts that can be arranged in countless ways.
They are also inherently flexible: their bodies can be bent, the light beam can be adjusted, and some are portable. 

All of these elements formed the basis of the illustrated stories.

look & feel

After exchanging mood boards, we moved on to a free and spontaneous look-and-feel phase, during which I experimented with different drawing styles.

We decided that using a raw, analog, and unconventional style would best capture the flexibility and artistry of the lamps.

Testing storytelling lines

FINALISING THE ILLUSTRATIONS

From the very beginning, the idea of using characters was pretty clear. 
The characters would interact with the lamps and directly embody their features.

This would demonstrate how these lamps radically change the environment in which they are placed, and therefore, the people living in it.
Showing this was another requirement of the briefing.

next serie

These lamps are huge mostly ceiling-mounted structures that dominates the ambient.
Designed with somehow unsettling shapes, they made us think of alien spaceships illuminating the night sky. 

I created abstracted vector illustrations around the silhouette of each lamp as the starting point for the narration, and the idea was welcomed.

finalising the illustrations

The process of finalizing the illustration was instinctive, guided more by aesthetics than by concept. 
An effort was made at the beginning to continue the style of the less'n'more illustrations, using the characters and a white background.

And yet it was necessary to visual counterbalance the products, being the first tiny and flexible, the second huge and fixed. Furthermore startships fly in space.
A dark background and elements of a starry sky where the final choice. The less'n'more characters occasionally accompany the lamps, but they dominate the scene, as they do in reality.

in The catalogueS

design & art direction: Milch + Honig Designkultur
photos: Markus Burke
text: Monika Obermeier

online