Three Yet One is a design exhibition that explores the roles different media play in shaping our understanding and perception of objects. Curated by Oscar Diaz & Henny van Nistelrooy for the London Design Festival, it showcases the work of twelve emergent designers working across Europe.



The exhibition takes as its starting point Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs. Rather than presenting an object from the same point of view through different media, the exhibition shows the objects from different perspectives. The curators had invited a photographer (Emma Wieslander) and a writer (Tim Parsons) to describe/illustrate the products from their personal point of view. The curators’ intention was to avoid the object-centric nature associated with design exhibitions by placing the objects within a wider cultural frame.

For the exhibition we were asked to design a small publication and invitation. We wanted our design to support the concept of the exhibition without visually over elaborating it: to allow the content to speak for itself. Our solution referred typographically to the exhibition title – three visual representations of the same idea – and became the identity adopted in the book and invitation.



The cover of the book presents the typographic solution for the title along with the curator's text. We liked the idea that the exhibition statement could be a cover in itself. Tim and Emma's interpretations of the objects are presented throughout the book in different combinations, each time creating a different reading order. The pages were designed in such a way that each project would feel lika a whole, and we tried to avoid creating spreads where the projects visually interacted with each other. Our aim was to avoid the feel of a classic "product catalogue" where the elements are organised in the same manner on every page.