Urooj Ali | September 26th, 2024 | Dubai, UAE
It’s taken me four years to get to this point with Collected Volumes. The majority of this time has been focused on my graphic design practice—creating and building brand identities, designing packaging, developing campaigns, and so many other opportunities for which I’m incredibly grateful.
While I hope to continue working with my clients on even more branding and graphic design projects, Collected Volumes is growing and evolving.
Since the very beginning, my focus has been to inspire new ways of thinking in order to create designs that are not only relevant but, most importantly, unique and thoughtful. Within my first couple of years of professional experience, I realized that the rapid pace of the world today was forcing designers and creatives to draw inspiration from a pool of work that was consistently “borrowing” each other’s ideas. The concept of “creative intervention” often meant simply changing colors and slapping on a different logo. Everything started to look and feel the same, rendering the term “inspired by” meaningless.
Of all my projects, the most well-designed (and from my perspective, the most successful) were conceptualized from real-life experiences—often from the most mundane, seemingly arbitrary parts of life. I document every interesting sign I see, brick patterns on the sidewalk, shadows. I collect packaging, printed plastic bags, old phone cards. It’s not about aesthetics; it’s about learning to look at things in ways that aren’t immediately apparent.
This isn’t a new discovery; in fact, I believe it’s design at its core. It seems simple, but the more time I spend considering how to make this approach more common within my own practice, the more I understand why it’s hard to implement—especially with so many shiny new tools at our fingertips. The core design principles need a refresh to remain relevant with our evolving technologies, while staying true to the beauty and history of the field. I’m not claiming to tackle that task entirely. Instead, I’d like to think I’m using tried-and-true methods to present a small slice of real-life collections, archives, and seemingly arbitrary inspirations to help us all see things differently.
So, this new branch, Collected Volumes Editions, will be a constantly growing library of our diverse personal archives. We have a few starting examples on the website, but our goal is to keep creating more. If you, or someone you know, has a collection or would be interested in starting one, please reach out—we’d love to talk about it for the sake of our ongoing search for real inspiration.
Contact us through info@collectedvolumes.com or send us DM on Instagram.
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