This love of “rhythm” extends from Tobias’ practice and bleeds into the industry with which he most likes to work: the music industry. Enjoying working with music, for how it allows him to “combine acoustic and visuals spheres”, Tobias tries his best to transform elements of the sounds he is working with into something perceptible. It’s also the sphere of music that Tobias believes to be conducive to breaking design rules and allowing creativity to flourish in an “unrestricted” way.
These ideas clearly translate into Tobias’ posters, and he identifies his piece for Brutalismus 3000, a Gabber duo from Berlin as being particularly resonant of this thinking. “Like the duo’s identity, the concept of the poster centres around a very rough and dark look,” Tobias explains. “The design is based on a barcode font, which consists only of horizontal lines.” Overlaying a light cut version of the font, bolder cuts are then generated to the point of distortion, resulting in “diffused shapes and black areas”. The final outcome – a black and white poster with levels of visual complexity as created by repetition – the overlaid, glitch-like visuals perfectly replicate the layers of conflicting sounds present throughout the music duo’s music.
“I use typographic patterns with the intention to create rhythm”, begins graphic designer Tobias Bolliger, “repetitive shapes followed by empty spaces generate variations of visual intensities.” It’s this experimental use of typography – plus the way the designer uses lettering to create shapes and forms – that defines his music-centred practice. But, with this conceptual approach, there is another key element to Tobias’ work, and that’s to “deform” typography, essentially making its primary purpose of legibility redundant. “By deforming typography as a carrier of information, new shapes are generated and the form is thereby pushed to the edge of its function.”