Reasons Not To Do Graphic Design by Yotam Hadar

Yotam Hadar’s portfolio is a fine example of educated and experienced graphic design. Graduating last year with an MFA from Yale after studying visual communication in Jerusalem, his work plays upon language and cultural differences within artistic realms. As a result, the designer’s projects are “research based, concept driven and type led”, emerging into a collection of confident publications.

Yotam is drawn to projects that employ the “interplay of media, the use of subtle gestures, humour, resources and attentive use of language”. An example of this is Reasons Not To Do Graphic Design, a notebook written and designed to display grounds for avoiding the subject completely. His reasoning is that graphic design is often “homogenising, conservative, forced, too quick, too easy, too hard, anecdotal, manipulative, misplaced idealism, mostly unrealised, crowded, dependent, unhealthy,” and so on. Yotam’s assessment of a subject he is involved with personally was a huge success, selling out completely at the New York Book Fair.

Applying bilingual qualities to a project is a running theme within Yotam’s work, a prime example being The State of Things, a catalogue for an inaugural exhibit at the Design Museum in Holon. The designer uses language to arrange eight thematic groups on display at the event, emphasising this by wrapping them in signature cover pages on paper of alternative stock and size. As a publication, The State of Things challenges the traditional design of Hebrew and English books that usually create two opposite covers “meeting uncomfortably in the middle”. Instead, Yotam arranges the bilingual content inverse to one another, rotated at 180 degrees to create a narrative that can share references images.

A particular favourite of ours is CT (Un)Bound, a publication displaying the research driven process that the designer adopts. To reflect the communicative feel of the exhibit which showcased local artists in New Haven, Yotam designed, edited and produced the publication locally. He even used Monotype Grotesque as the typeface designed by Frank H Pierpont, a New Haven native.

Over each of his projects, Yotam displays a refined eye for detail and theoretical thinking with a humorous twist.