‘Visual Joy’ guides Bathgate Design’s identity for artist Alex Fulton

For 12 years, New Zealand artist and interior designer Alex Fulton presented herself through the same identity. “Eventually you realise you’ve moved and the furniture hasn’t,” Fulton tells us. Her practice runs across interiors, teaching, speaking and the original pieces that she sells through galleries, while the art has increasingly become a much bigger part of what she does. She asked Bathgate Design for a new identity that could represent all of that rather than a tidy-up of the one she already had. The Christchurch-based branding and graphic design studio was invited to create the strategy, identity, copywriting, art direction and photography, as well as the website design. Fulton’s artistic practice explores colour, form and structure through hard-edge abstraction. “My biggest worry was probably that it would become too polished, too serious or too ‘designery.’ My work has always been colourful, confident and a little bit irreverent, and I wanted the identity to have that same energy without shouting over the work,” she explains. “We were completely let into Alex’s world. Her home, her studio and her creative process,” Bathgate Design’s Creative Director Charlotte Sole tells us. “Rather than focusing on what Alex does, we focused on what sits underneath all of it: her curiosity, her instinct, her zest, her taste and her particular way of seeing the world. A big part of our strategy was identifying the creative tensions that make her work successful in the first place: maximalism and restraint, play and precision, observation and originality. The identity works in much the same way. It’s about knowing when to push and when to hold back.”