Leta Sobierajski (@letasobierajski) combines traditional graphic design elements with photography, art, and styling to create utterly unique visuals. The art director, graphic designer and photographer runs a studio in New York City with her Australian husband Wade. Together they do projects ranging from branding to photo art direction, and recently installation as well.
How does your process of creation work with Wade?
Wade and I are quite symbiotic. We work together through every possible capacity of a project. Basically if you think of a human body, he’s one appendage and I’m the other. We fill in for each other when one person is stuck or feeling burnt out, or if one person has explored too far and needs some assistance.
We tackle all projects together, whether it’s branding or art direction. We both think about concepts separately and then come together and talk about our ideas. Then we collaborate and fuse those ideas together in order to find the most appropriate result.
I would say though that Wade is a bit more skilful on the graphic design side of things as he comes from a more branding heavy background than me. I’ve worked in motion graphics a lot previously, and photography. But I’ve done a range of stuff from editorial at a magazine and I worked at Ogilvy ages ago where I did an internship, so I’ve worked in advertising as well. I kind of just ended up feeling that working with a photographic tactile element is what was what felt most appropriate for me. So I have a bit more of that to bring to the table and Wade is more on the branding side. But we do everything together.
Do you find that coming from these different backgrounds or disciplines you push yourselves in different directions and find uncharted territory creatively? How do you combine your skillsets to create something new?
Yeah I would say so. It’s great because even though we are quite like-minded, we still have two extremely different perspectives. I’m often really good at misinterpreting things, and so I get some good ideas from misinterpreting things. Wade is great at going off and iterating and reiterating.
We also teach each other more about our skill sets. I’m definitely more familiar with photography and because of that I’ve taught Wade certain things, and he sort spins off and turns it into his own thing, and we end up having an interesting result from that. It’s the same for me with branding and learning different digital toolkits from him as well.
We tackle all projects together, whether it’s branding or art direction. We both think about concepts separately and then come together and talk about our ideas. Then we collaborate and fuse those ideas together in order to find the most appropriate result.
I would say though that Wade is a bit more skilful on the graphic design side of things as he comes from a more branding heavy background than me. I’ve worked in motion graphics a lot previously, and photography. But I’ve done a range of stuff from editorial at a magazine and I worked at Olgivy ages ago where I did an internship, so I’ve worked in advertising as well. I kind of just ended up feeling that working with a photographic tactile element is what was what felt most appropriate for me. So I have a bit more of that to bring to the table and Wade is more on the branding side. But we do everything together.
Your work often seems to have an element of performance to it. Can you tell us more about that?
I think that the idea of performance in our work has sort of spurred off from spending too may hours at our studio just sitting in a chair and realising that something needs to change. We enjoy being physical with our work, having movement, and sometimes sweating, and sometimes bending into positions where we are not so flexible.
I think that finding a way to incorporate your body into the work that you’re doing gives you such a more personal connection with the work that you’re making. There is often times an even more identifiable asset to what you’re doing because if your arm is in it or you’re actually wearing a bodysuit in what you’re doing. That’s also design because your body is becoming one of the visual assets of the composition.
How do find you find working on projects in other countries like Japan?
It’s been really stimulating! It’s nice to see the way that other countries and cultures work. I spent 3 months in Japan over the summer where we collaborated on a project for Vogue Fashion’s Night Out. I felt that being present for the meetings and being able to converse, and check out the sites was really important.
Our method of thinking doesn’t necessarily change, but depending on who you’re working with, your social interactions need to adjust in order to make sure that everybody is matching up with their communication.
It’s interesting because we work with people in California and other states, and we’ve never met them face to face. But in other instances, of course what we to be present in the other country for the project, and meet the people that are hiring us because it gives us a much more personal connection with the work.
Interestingly enough with the projects that we’ve done in Japan both been physical. One project was a store takeover for Sense of Place, which is a store that’s in five different cities in Japan. We were only able to be in the one in Tokyo and we were never expecting anything like it but our faces ended up in the windows of all of these shops! We thought it was important that we were there for that. We did installations as well.
It feels extremely gratifying to be there and see the thing that your identity is being exposed to but that you may not actually physically be exposed to.
Would you say you’re more inspired by the people in these locations rather than the locations themselves?
I think it’s a combination of both and it depends on the brief of course. For the 2 projects that we’ve done in Tokyo, they have required a photo aspect where people want to take pictures in front of what you’ve created or what you’re doing. The first project we did there was in Harajuku so we asked ourselves how does feel if you’re making something in Harajuku? How does this emulate Harajuku? We used a lot colour and we used wigs which are also emblematic of the style that exists in that neighbourhood.
For the Fashion’s Night Out project we made this photo booth and we wanted to make it feel a little more slick because it was a very fashion focused event. We wanted to make something that felt all encompassing, even though we only had a 22,000cm x 22,000cm space to work in. We wanted to make people feel like they were dressed in their best outfits and they could immerse themselves in this little world, and they could capture that essence in that small boxed out space.
So I guess it’s a combination of both. We are thinking about the people and we’re thinking about the event, but we’re also thinking about the neighbourhood’s in which they live.
You’ve mentioned you like to create things that trigger awareness—physical and emotional awareness. Can you elaborate on that?
We want to want to make things that aren’t meaningless. We want to create things that encourage people to feel like they’re being taken outside of themselves for a minute. We want to make people feel like they’re welcome and they don’t need to be self conscious about who they are.
We hosted a party for Valentine’s Day last month where we built a maze and sculptures, and we had these people running around in costumes where their identity was completely concealed but they were going around dancing with all of these people at the party to instigate movement and instigate connection, to get people to dance. That was so rewarding for us because, you have nothing to lose, you don’t know who these people are so you may as well dance with them. The dancers were in the middle of the dance floor and people just started to jump in and dance in this circle with them.
That’s so satisfying for us because it was a bit of design but more than anything it’s personal and we were trying to trigger emotion. I guess we’re trying to help people shed their adult inhibitions and revert back to this pre-thinking, child-like lack of self consciousness.
When you’re coming up with these projects where do you seek inspiration? Where does your thought process lead you?
We’ve got two principles that we use to help manifest our work. One of them is ‘designers performance’ which is something we’ve just touched on, but it’s making sure there is this physical aspect to what we’re doing.
Sometimes it’s hard when you have a brief that is completely open where it’s like do anything, you know, like so how I interpret that? So making sure there’s always a performative aspect to what you’re doing is extremely important to us. It also keeps us more engaged and more entertained in what we’re doing.
The other principle is trying to figure out a twist to what you’re doing and making something feel purposeful but also eclectic in how you interpret something. For example we made a book out of concrete because all of the buildings that were being featured were concrete. So we’re trying to understand something and trick things a little a bit to make it feel different.
So these are the 2 mindsets that we start with and from there, we look a books, architecture and fashion. I think that’s where we get a lot of our inspiration as well as the travel we do. It might be things that we have seen in the past that have triggered certain emotions and designers that we’ve looked up to as well.
What’s next for you and Wade?
Last summer we took seperate sabbaticals, that was really stimulating, and really creatively empowering. If things work out this summer, depending upon projects, we’re aiming to do that again but this time together. So attempting to relocate to a different city, most likely Tokyo again for 3 months, and see what that can do for our creativity, our lives and our wellbeing.
Work-wise there’s a possibility we’ll be working on some bigger things – physically bigger. But that’s all I can really say about that!
View more of Leta’s work at letasobierajski.com and @letasobierajski.
