The first and foremost one would be: don’t be fearful of design and don’t be afraid to fail — I can see some people take it too seriously, while fear prevents them from making something that really impacts. Cherish your passion and motivation. It doesn’t have to be political, inspiring you to change something if you are not that kind of person. However, finding your inner voice, which does not hit on the first search, is critical. Keep experimenting. when Making money (surely I remember we all have to pay bills), always remember to design for pleasure and out of curiosity. Enrich your practice by whatever you learn in life.
Military service
Basically, I’d got hands-on experience before I took up a design course. My pretty first job was being a photographer in the IDF spokesperson film unit. Fortunately or unfortunately, everyone in Israel has a connection with the army. For instance, Ziv Koren, an internationally renown photographer, is a reserved guy from my unit. I had a chance to meet him as a soldier, as many other renowned Israeli news photographers you might not be familiar with. Really bright and creative people have served in IDF, dedicating their talents to the military needs — so have I. At the age of 18-19, I got an opportunity to publish my images of the Cast Lead operation, which was going on 15 years ago. Same location, different story, quite a lot of resemblance anyway.
I published the photos in big newspapers in Israel and abroad. Pretty weird to say, it was a really memorable experience for me. Participating in sometimes tragic national events, I met a lot of talented people and had an opportunity to become a professional photographer.
Photo in an Israeli newspaper «Yedioth Ahronoth»
Clubs and music
These are my first designs — I created them in my early 20s, ten years ago. Through friends who owned bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, I became a designer for a cult club called Michatronix. I worked for it over the fourth (and last) year of its existence. Morey Talmor, who designed prior to me, was one of the senior designers for Sagmeister and the design director for the Bullet magazine. He is a really good friend of mine, so it was a pleasure to replace him in designing for a little club. This is what I created for its shutdown party, happy and sad at a time. It’s my first work I was proud of, and this was when it dawned on me that I love designing for musicians, culture and nightlife. In the beginning, it was mostly experimental design, and there were a few failures in retrospect, but I decided to go for it with all of my passion.
Poster design. Client: Michatronix club. 2013
This is a German label called Disco Halal, owned by an Israeli guy. It’s about celebrating and reviving the sound of the Middle East by giving it an electronic edge. This is a typeface, and lots of posters and artworks which I created for the label.
This is an artwork for an electronic music artist called Naduve. The design reflects his Moroccan origin: basically, it’s an hommage to cabbalistic and biblical arrangement of a text.
This is a design for a Russian duo called Simple Symmetry. This was a kind of a tribute to Russian constructivism. Here is a sunset, a kind of a plane heading to the East (hinting the release title «Plane Goes East»), and the classical constructivist palette of red and black. This is another version with the same shapes arranged in a different way.
Group identity. Client: Disco Halal. 2016
Music packaging and custom type. Client: Chaim. 2017
This one is a bit funky thing. This is a project for a fairly successful electronic duo from Israel called Red Axes — a kind of a trademark poster for the evening of their 100% original music. These are the posters I created for their lives in the city, all in the same technique — I used a toner printer to achive this look. They were printed in really small sizes and magnified, so it’s not a look created in Photoshop.
Identity for a music tour. Client: Red Axes. 2020
The Brothers
This is a branding for one of the most successful restaurants in Tel Aviv called The Brothers. The brief was to surprise returning customers with a kind of easter eggs. For this, I took historical images of Tel Aviv and inserted modern symbols in them, and got seemingly untouched pictures. This is an iconic building, a big company everybody in Israel is familiar with (Similar Web), and here I put a guy on a segway at the front. This is the first water tower in Tel Aviv, a very specific Israeli symbol, because the graffiti on its side means «man’s rights in the family» which is also a local icon. Here’s a scooter in the lower right, this is President Rabin with The Brothers merch, and these are the posters for the restrooms. The restaurant is located in an American Zionists’ building of the 1950s. To create these, I took original posters that were used to promote events in the 1960s. And then we created this crazy wall of mish-mash. Some of the images are forged — on the top you can see a poster promoting the concert of Red Axes, so here you need to look very attentively to tell between the contemporary and old. Altogether, this is a tribute to the original building, traditional cuisine and a modern approach to it — a tribute to the mixture of old and new if speaking in a broader way about Israeliness.
Identity for the restaurant. Client: Brothers restaurant
Carlsberg member cards
This is the project my partner and I did for Carlsberg. Since the beginning of my career, I’d been trying to avoid these kinds of projects as they were always underpaid: let’s say, for twenty bucks you got fifteen opinionated co-owners of a club going off in different directions getting across what they would like to see.
This project was good, and we quickly agreed on the brief. They were going to celebrate five years of the club and wanted me to create a member card. I came up with an idea of using Voyager Golden Record as a reference — that’s the record NASA sent into space: the proportions of human beings, the way we navigate and so on and so forth. It was important to us not to create a kind of a bootleg, so we used the same visual language as NASA did. Through that, we told the story of night life in Tel Aviv for those who’d visit clubs after the Doomsday. Eventually, we designed a whole set of member cards.
The card in the lower right represents the story of drunkness, where I and my colleague Stas Tuchinsky made play with a Russian gesture that stands for drinking.
The one in the upper right is a tribute to audio. We quoted Pulp Fiction — Uma Turman and Travolta’s dance — and on the top of the card there are the coordinates of the club. There’s a molecule of dopamine — what the body gives off when experiencing music.
The upper left one is about sex in a club, so there are the embrio development stages at the bottom, the placement of the club on Earth, eye contact, hands holding, and a locked toilet door.
The lower left one demonstrates skipping the line by a guy who is a member; there’s also a black hole and the cocaine formula underneath, referring to some visitors and an alternative usage of this card at the end of the day.
Member cards. Client: Sputnik. 2019
Mural
This is the project I delved into during Covid. I was commissioned to make this mural by Broken Fingers, a very successful street artists collective in Israel. They were given 80 buildings to paint up, and other artists were offered to participate in the project as well, so I took the Kiryat Shmona soccer stadium. I worked in this style for a year, perfecting this specific technique of creating Matisse-like shapes — it was great fun for me to meditate over the process. I made a lot; the images participated in exhibitions and were selling very well! That pretty much devoured my free time within that year, but I had a great time mastering it.
Mural created as part of the Lemala Project. 2022
