Autumn 2023
One brain, four eyes
Skolos+Wedell, Overlap / Dissolve
Designed by Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, Oro Editions, $50
Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell met as students at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1975, where Wedell was studying photography and Skolos graphic design. Their long partnership, in work and in life (they later married), started almost straight away. For 40-plus years, they have worked side by side as Skolos+Wedell creating singular and idiosyncratic graphic design that blends typography and photography, analogue and digital processes, and two- and three-dimensions. This body of work is collected in the duo’s highly personal new monograph, Overlap / Dissolve.
Structured chronologically, each decade from the 1980s to the 2020s is given a chapter showing the couple’s work across mediums and clients, with a special emphasis on the studio’s poster work. Their career parallels the rise of digital technology in the design field but the paradox in their work is that it looked digital despite being created with analogue processes …
Cover of Overlap / Dissolve, photographed with short tracing paper dust jacket.
Top. Silkscreen poster for Lyceum Fellowship, Student Architecture Competition, 2008.
Jarrett Fuller, designer, writer, educator, North Carolina, US
Read the full version in Eye no. 105 vol. 27, 2023
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.