Description:

Satellites is a platform connecting the past, present and future of Aotearoa Asian art.

Its brand identity reflects that: rejecting the notion of a monolithic Asian identity and instead exploring a more expansive expression that captures the strength and adaptability of the diverse range of diaspora Asian identities in Aotearoa.

The simple visual motif of the expiry date — usually stamped onto cans and other food products — allows us to speak to multiple ideas at once, from it being a marker of a specific time in history (hinting at the storage and archival of cultural memory) to it being a unique label that stretches and warps– one that is never the same twice, reflecting the distortion and acts of translation/mistranslation that take place in migrant cultures.

Typography leads the visual experience of the website, with the distinctive warped ‘expiry date’ lettering providing a way for the identity to be encoded across the entire website. Even simple typographic layouts become unique with programmatically random distortion, allowing for highly expressive typography. This live typography brings the brand to life on the website, allowing for each user’s visit to be unique by randomising typographic variables on each page load.

In order to encompass the three pillars of the project – magazine, archive and public programme — a modular approach was developed, allowing for a core graphic element — a rounded frame within a square frame — to be adapted and resized to fit each of these different contexts.

Finally, the website employs a smart search function that is a result of a close collaboration with the client’s archival team, smart use of database queries and some frontend code magic. Both the search and filter features allow for many ‘entryways’ into a large and complex archive that will only grow in detail and size over time. The concept is that the more metadata connections that are added over time, the more valuable these search and filtering functions become, allowing for unique connections to be made across the history of Asian Aotearoa diaspora — whether it’s Chinese heritage dancers active in the 2010s or Stokes Valley sculptors in the 1960s. The CMS also allows editors and archivists to explicitly create connections between items within the archive, adding another layer of interconnectedness for users to discover.