Inland Pillar is a placeholder for a practice built around packaging. These pages hold a few notes on how the work happens, rather than a finished site. We describe the questions we ask, the materials we return to, and the room where drawings and boards take shape, without claiming more than that.
The Studio Room
The room holds flat files, a long table, samples pinned to a wall that changes slowly. Light comes from one side, steady through the day. Nothing here is arranged for show. Boards sit stacked in the order they were cut, waiting to be picked up again, turned over, and looked at once more before anything is decided.
Paper, Ink, Presses
The work depends on ordinary materials: sheets of board, plate cylinders, running rolls of ink. We think about grain direction, coating weight, how a fold behaves under pressure. Presses are not abstract to us; they set real limits on colour and line. Working within those limits, rather than against them, shapes most of what we draw.
Questions Before Drawings
We start by asking what a box has to carry, and what it has to survive. Weight, handling, storage, the hands that open it. Only after these questions settle do we begin sketching. Drawings come from constraints, not the other way round. We would rather sit with a problem than rush toward a shape that looks finished too soon.
On The Board
- a folding carton for glass jars
- structural test for a shipping sleeve
- die line revisions for a tray
- colour trials on uncoated stock
Working notes
ApproachLettering is drawn by hand first, even when it will be set from type later. Every job begins with questions, and the answers are pinned above the drawing board. The proportions are checked with a ruler and again by eye from across the room. A first drawing is done small and fast, then redrawn slowly at full size.
MaterialsProofs are pulled in one colour before any second colour is mixed. Type is kept in cases by size, and a missing sort is noted the day it is missed. Every proof is kept, marked on the back, in a drawer nobody clears out. Ink is mixed by weight and the recipe is written on the tin.
RoomShelves of type and paper line one wall; the other wall is kept bare for pinning up work. A radio is kept for the cleaning up, never for the drawing. The windows are opened at the end of the day to let the ink smell out. The floor is swept before printing, because dust finds wet ink.