Designer of the Week: Okapi Studio and Modular Design
By Megalongcat • Nov 12th, 2008 • Category: Furniture Design, Industrial Design, Product Design, Recent Posts
Gabi Lungu at Henkel Design Awards 2007
Ladies and gentlemen it’s time for your favorite portion of the Creative Fluff magazine blog (insert drumroll please) I am pleased to bring you the lucky Designer of the Week: OkapiStudio. We were lucky to get in contact with a young design studio such as Okapi and after a few back and forth emails we were given the chance to review one of their best design pieces: The Shelf Concept Project.
Before we go into detail about one of their best design projects, lets talk about a little of their history. Okapi studio is an Art Direction and Design Consultant agency based California and Romania with over five years of experience in international markets “offering a fine mixture of traditional and new media creative services”. OkapiStudio is run by three individuals: Gabi Lungu the Creative Director, Andrei Ostacie the Marketing Director, and Sam Purtill who is their managing partner.
I’m sure I’m not giving their studio any justice when it comes to describing what it is exactly that they do so below is a short description from their website:
“OkapiStudio is a multidisciplinary creative shop, encompassing talents that excel in full advertising services, brand strategy, graphic, web and motion design. We help companies in the research and development process and we fine tune their brand and positioning by carefully planing each move.”
Enough background lets get into the awesomeness that is Okapi studio. The picture above is from their exclusive Shelf Concept Project which at a glance looks like a normal, minimalist, and modern shelving unit that could be sold as an item through CB2 or another contemporary furniture store. But as you can see below, there’s more than meets the eye when OkapiStudio is involved:
The shelves are modular, a concept that is being readily adopted by all industrial design groups recently (within the past two years). Modular design is a good base for any furniture/storage project because it gives consumers/users the abiltity to not only adjust how their furniture looks within a space, but it gives those with smaller homes the ability to save on space while owning an exceptionaly designed storage system.
Below is a small clip from their website concerning the Shelf Project:
“When we play in-house with our talent sometimes we come up with amazing things. This is a classic example of research for functionality while trying to use a cost effective solution for spacing issues. Be it used for home or office purposes, the modular office storage equipment is a flexible and smartly designed solution that adapts to space requirements. Built from plastic polymers, it comes in lightweight customizable modules that can be used accordingly to everyone’s needs. The shelf concept provides a fresh and modern approach to similar common wood based products on the market, with it’s perfect shapes that mold around the objects and the possibility for redesign on the fly to match any setting you might have in mind.”
If you haven’t googled them already, you should Check out the Okapi Design Studio here:
Megalongcat is also known as Fred McCoy and is commonly referred to as "A Man among Men". He is a third year Communication Design and Technology student currently pursuing his BFA degree at Parsons, The New School for Design. This eclectic designer resides in Jersey City, NJ. Fred’s design work is usually focused towards print and graphic design, yet despite this his work spans across a multitude of new media art forms ranging from motion graphics and animation, all the way to GUI design.
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