Bongoût
By BOBUSED was really lucky that Bongoût or let's say - Anna and Meeloo - agreed to do our logo. We corresponded via Email and soon found common ground. The idea of the Steel Cactus and straight powerful lines was one of the first ideas. The second logo was the crank set ring done up in a prickly cactus style. I was so knocked out that i wanted both logos. These guys are good. Below, you can read some quotes from their press kit. Go visit the site as well - here - and enjoy.
BONGOÛT MEANS "GOOD TASTE"
1 . L’HISTOIRE DE BONGOÛT
Bongoût are Meeloo Gfeller and Anna Hellsgård. We produce silkscreen artist books and gig posters, all of which are hand-made from start to finish. We also do commissioned graphic design work for everyone from underground record labels to skateboard brands, from illegal noise concerts to world music festivals, movie productions, corporate clothing companies and tobacco companies.
Meeloo started Bongoût in 1995, in Strasbourg. The name was inspired by The Cramps song ‘You Got Good Taste’ but, not wanting to use the English, the French words ‘bon goût’ were combined instead. For the first 5 years, the Bongoût atelier was located in a warehouse in Kehl, Germany (just across the Rhine from Strasbourg). Along with several other people, it was also used as a rehearsal space by bands and a place to hold concerts and parties.
Meeloo met Anna in Berlin the day after 9-11. At that point we relocated our atelier to Bordeaux for a year and a half. In 2003, we moved to our current location, a former tanning shop in East Berlin (Friedrichshain).
2. LE MÉCANISME DE BONGÔUT - ABSTRACT vs FIGURATIVE. ART WORLD vs UNDERGROUND.
Our books are usually considered too raw to be contemporary art and too arty to be underground. They fit somewhere between the two but they don’t fit anywhere in particular. The same applies in the graphic design world too. What we do is not classical graphic design but it also isn’t part of the fashion for computer graphics-based design either.
A lot of our books, especially the collaborative books, are a mixture of abstract and figurative work. We like it when the images are not so obvious or easy to understand and require time to look at and appreciate. People always like to put things in boxes so they can recognise what it is. And the fact that they do recognise it is simply a form of self-gratification. With our books, people don’t know how to react. They don't know what it is.
All of the books and posters are printed in limited editions, usually between 50 and 180 of each. But we never reprint anything. Even if we could sell more, it holds no interest for us. We prefer to take the risk, move on and do something new.
AESTHETICS
Our influences range from contemporary art to outsider art, underground comics culture, Swiss typography, Cuban, Polish and Russian posters. We try to be as open as we can all the time to new influences that cut across all disciplines of art and culture. The visual aesthetics and attitude of independent cinema, noise music, rock´n´roll clichés and black metal inspire us as much printed material.
One of our earliest influences were the record sleeves designed by Nick Garrard, manager of British psychobilly band The Meteors. He had a garage punk label and was putting out a lot of rockabilly reissues in the late 80s and early 90s. The covers were all really well done. They were inspired by vintage design and used a lot of old fonts found in 50s magazines but he used them in a contemporary context. It was similar to the work Art Chantry was doing in Seattle but nobody else was doing stuff like that. The Killed By Death sleeves, a series of compilation LPs featuring rare and raw vintage punk songs, were also a big influence.
This was all before computers, when everything was still done by hand. It wasn’t really illustrative, more like graphic design but also inspired by punk aesthetic. It was work that played by the conventions of graphic design but also set out to destroy them. That was very inspiring to us.
Most of the fonts and typesetting in our works are done by hand. We hand draw most fonts or use a lot of Letraset. You can see when something has been typeset by computer, it’s all really straight and clean. Even if you don’t notice it, you feel it. We want to keep a hand-made quality in our work. We use the computer as a tool without letting it dictate to us and becoming a slave to it.