The View From Skew | April 2024

TL:DR Skew’s creative team shares their insights, inspiration and intelligence on everything design and branding. ""

Every month the Skew design department gets together to discuss interesting sources of inspiration, emerging trends, design software developments and anything else that has caught our eye. This month we’re all geeking out about tech; whether that be as part of inspiring art installations, investigating how to integrate AI technologies into our workflow or researching innovative brands working at the intersection of biotech and design.

Pixel This

Sara, our Head of Design, went to visit Refik Anadol’s installation at the Serpentine gallery on Sunday. Anadol has been at the forefront of digital art creation for 15 years and for his latest show he has designed immersive experiences inspired by nature. Entitled "Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive," this is his first major solo exhibition in the UK. Viewers are invited into environments born from years of experimentation with visual data sourced from 16 locations across the globe including rainforests and coral reefs. Using technologies like LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and photogrammetry, Anadol crafts a tapestry of digital art that blurs the lines between nature, science, art and technology. His past works include transforming Casa Batlló by Gaudí into a living sculpture in front of a live audience and creating an AI sculpture showcased on the sphere in Las Vegas. Although the show closed this weekend in London follow him on Instagram for more out of this world creative AI inspiration.

Fashioning AI

At Skew we are always on the lookout for new ways to utilise AI developments in our day-to-day creative process. This month we’ve been playing around with the DressX fashion generator within Discord, which enables us to experiment with multiple styles and outfits on a single, consistent AI model. This allows us to swiftly iterate and explore various design concepts, easily creating a variety of look book style images. We’ve also been experimenting with the new character reference feature in Midjourney, which opens up a realm of possibilities for consistent character generation. By uploading a character, we can seamlessly integrate it into our work, ensuring continuity and coherence across images created. It's worth noting that this feature is designed to work with characters rather than real people. The whole team is keen to see how developments like these can help us push the boundaries and further improve efficiency in our workflow. Find out more about DressX through their Instagram and check out this quick ‘how to’ from Medium about Midjourney's new character reference feature here.

Homegrown Produce

During some recent brand and eco-material research, Skew designer Alix introduced the team to Normal Phenomena of Life, a UK based concept store dedicated to offering ‘biotech-enabled products in limited edition collections.’ This collective is on a mission to blend biology with design in a seriously innovative way. Instead of relying on traditional production techniques, they're tapping into biotech to create some mind-blowing products. We're talking about inks made from algae and clothes that are literally grown and dyed using bacteria. It's not your run-of-the-mill brand, that's for sure. It's pretty intriguing to see how they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in design and sustainability. Who knows, maybe one day we'll all be rocking clothes grown in a lab.

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