RES Features: RES 10
Identikal
Words: Steve Anderson
Photo: Eddie Otchere
Sometimes called "the most famous twins in design," Nick and Adam Hayes form the aptly named design firm Identikal, whose eclectic layouts, fonts, multimedia and graphics have drawn recognition in some of the hippest design circles in Europe and America.
Nick and Adam grew up in Camberwell in South London and founded Identikal in 1998, when they were fresh out of university. They have been working in London ever since, making a name for themselves with a diverse and continually evolving body of work that is at once playful and serious, ranging from graphic design and typography (they have over 250 fonts to their credit) to their latest endeavor, electronic music.
Identikal's work is driven by creative tensions arising from the brothers' sometimes divergent passions for technology and style, resulting in a unique hybridity in the way they image organic bodies and vectorized surfaces, as well as spaces that simultaneously celebrate flatness and 3-dimensionality.
"The tensions are simple," Nick says. "My brother is a 'pixel head' -- he loves texture -- and I am a 'vector freak' -- I love flat color. When we work on a brief it always starts with an argument -- what style will suit the client's needs? The more we argue, the better the outcome of the work!"
Inspired by contemporary electronic music, especially drum-and- bass, the brothers describe their work as "synaesthetic," meaning that they fuse multiple senses into a single experience (e.g., the ability to see music or hear color). "We believe that typography is all about playing with visual sound," explains Nick. "With the introduction of digital sound technology, design and music have never been closer. We use the same ideas and technology in producing a typeface as we do with producing a beat, and the same layouts for a design as for the rhythm and arrangement of a track."
Identikal's work is sometimes described as futuristic, but part of what makes it interesting is the way the pair blends contemporary visions of the future with the ways past generations have imagined our present. "We are always interested in how the future should be perceived," confirms Nick. "But it's always important to learn from the past and how other cultures respond to the future, too. We like to look at how other artists, writers and scientists see the future and this in turn helps to influence how we perceive it to be. And yes, sometimes the way the past envisions the future is definitely better than how we see it today -- we love 'eighties futurism,' for example, and how digital typography, video games and LCD screens really brought a vision of the future to the masses."
