Blog

Samantha Copland of Perfume Playground started it as a sensory experience for your nose, offering workshops to create your personal, natural signature scents while having the pleasure of thoroughly experiencing each note as you add it into your perfumed concoctions.

As designer’s in our respective fields we tend to focus on our disciplines and become really good at what we do…which means we sometimes forget to look outwards to gain new perspectives and to see what designer’s from other design industries are up to.

Halo Print Co is the brainchild of husband and wife team, Meagan and Angel Monsanto. It’s a new print shop that recently opened in Newtown in Sydney’s Inner West offering custom printed tees and other apparel, on-demand printing and a same-day print service.

The second installment of Behind the Designer kicks off with Huy Nguyen, a recent designer on issue 9. Huy undoubtedly has an eye for photography and the style that is seen within his photos is reflected back into his design work. Having worked as a freelancer while gaining experience at Ligature Journal, we’ve seen Huy do more and more work in the arts—our curiosity got the better of us and we wanted to know how and why he’s gotten into this sector.

As advocates and supporters of young and emerging designers we are finally releasing our first collection of prints, working in collaboration with designers that have worked with us in the past. We welcome Lydia Morgan back into our studio (for an albeit short stint) to collaborate with us and we are now happily offering three of her illustrations (to you) as prints. Lydia was a part of our issue eight team and we took this opportunity to sit down with her and talk about the goings-on since finishing up at Ligature Journal.

While the start of the pandemic may have felt like a life time ago, it has had lasting ramifications on our society. From quite early on we started seeing racially-charged verbal and physical attacks on the Asian community, a boycotting and avoidance of Asian eateries and supermarkets and closures of our favourite local Asian restaurants. Cases in Australia, at this point, were quite few and far in between but that didn’t stop some members of our society expressing their racially charged views.

Thy Mai is an up-and-coming designer, illustrator and animator who is currently finishing up her degree at the University of Technology, Sydney. As part of her course Thy was tasked with creating a short motion trailer for Bloomsbury Publishing promoting Stuart Turton’s new book ‘The Devil and the Dark Water’. Having worked on issue 9 as part of our design team we took this chance to chat with her about the thinking that went on behind her motion trailer.

In this post I want to talk about the cover story behind the design of Ligature Journal Issue Nine. The issue is the third and final in a series of issues considering the theme; Design and Place.

Without fail, every team that we’ve run through the press tutorial with has expressed how refreshing and satisfying it was to design something physically from start to finish. Designers often feel super glued to their digital screens, unable to walk away from it even after the end of the business day. A fair few of us ultimately pick up a hands-on hobby to sort of counteract that—making something with your hands will always be undeniably satisfying.

At the time of writing these are our three most recent issues. All delve into the relationship between design and place. Prior to these issues we chose a different theme for each issue, so for us this three issue series on a single theme is unusual. So, why did we do it?