Hasta La Ideas

As mentioned in my previous post, I have visited Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) in Bangkok, where I also met a lot of emerging designers who showed me some of their work. TCDC runs a support program for emerging Thai designers in order to promote Thai design and culture. “We want to add value to handmade things and small production scales,” explains Kum, one of the initiators of the program. “We invite designers from various disciplines to do a workshop with us and make them think more like managers. We want to give them new perspectives and link them with the industry. It is all about learning by doing and sharing the experience.”

Featured above are Luum – a design team creating graphics and packaging. Their candle cards for example are little present boxes for any occasion, containing a candle and graphic message. TCDC helped to develop a selling tool (brochure) for this product series to better communicate the ideas of the individual candle cards. Luum also created a range of “Thai Souvenirs” – shown above their Thai Boxing Kitchen Kit and their Thai Smile face covers (worn by themselves).

Muay Parivudhiphongs aka Taxi Dermy presented a range of bags and stationary – some of them very versatile pieces that can be re-configured for various needs. She also designed a headphone keyring – a simple little object that offers a great solution against cable spaghetti.

Penn Gang are a team of Illustrators and Urban Toy Designers that design and produce what they call “Mini Pillows”. They explain the purpose of them not just as being cute (kawaii) but as tools for showing emotions. The product range is produced by themselves. They started off in black and white, but since working with TCDC further developed them in color and apparently now sell loads through the TCDC shop.

Kwanhatai Tankeyul is a truly gifted illustrator who compares his drawing process to meditation. He presented his sketch books which were truly inspiring! With the help of TCDC he developed his sketches into products such as notebooks and badges. However, I can see his characters going way beyond this and picture them as 3D characters which would give any Kid Robot kids and other urban toy enthusiasts fits of enthusiasm! Unfortunately neither Penn Gang nor Kwanhatal have a website – but I got their email addresses in case you would like to collaborate with them or purchase their designs.

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