Plus Eighty One + Trollbäck
As I was leafing through a back issue of +81 Plus Eighty One, the Japanese design magazine, I stopped at the cover interview with Jakob Trollbäck.
I recognized the colorful circular logo and grid of icons as the design system for the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and wanted to know more about the designer behind them.
Jakob Trollbäck is that person.
Trollbäck's strength is simple directness. "I'm pretty good at knowing when something is good."
He claims to be self-taught, which implies no formal education, but he certainly learned a lot working as a Creative Director at R/GA, and through founding his own graphic design firm Trollbäck + Company (T+Co.) in New York.
The SDG assignment came to him while working on a project with writer/director Richard Curtis. "Would you like to help me make them popular?"
Trollbäck's first challenge was understanding the goals himself. In his words, the UN’s language describing them was “long, complex, and boring”. Bureaucratic.
Yet, there is nothing complicated about goals like eradicating poverty and hunger, ensuring health and education, and standardizing gender equality. After simplification, Trollbäck brought in a trusted partner to help him with the iconography - Swiss designer Christina Ruegg Grässli.
Once they joined forces, the design system (color palette, 17 icons, 169 targets) clicked into place.
The project deeply influenced both Trollbäck and Grässli.
Trollbäck decided to focus T+Co. entirely on sustainability-oriented communication design, and Grässli founded a sister shop in Stockholm called The New Division.
The Trollbäck article was a perfect opener for the wider issue of +81 Plus Eighty One, themed as a “Sustainable Design Tour”.
Other stops on the tour include short features on Kjetil Trædal Thorsen from Snøhetta, Hester Van Dijk and Reinder Bakker from Overtreaders W, and Tom Szaky from Loop.
Plus a series of business profiles on renewable energy companies Heliogen, Vortex Bladeless, and Toyota Woven City.
Followed by several looks at community revitalization projects in Japan in Maebashi (Gunma), Yusuhara (Kochi), and Kamikatsu (Tokushima).
As far as I can tell, +81 Plus Eighty One does not publish online so the only way to get it in the US is by ordering a back issue of the print magazine, or going to your local Kinokuniya book store/newsstand.
More here …
https://www.plus81.com/magazine
https://www.trollback.com/work
Afterthought 1: You may know this already, but +81 is the telephone country code for Japan. It’s a good name for a design magazine published in Japanese with parallel text in English.
Afterthought 2: One of the famous people you may see wearing the circular SDG program logo pinned on their lapel is cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He is a UN Messenger of Peace and regularly sports the logo to show his support for the goals.
More on the MOPs here …
