Design systems and approaches often reveal more about a studio’s instincts than their intentions, and the identity for Open M Art Fair 2025, organised by abC_art book in China, is a good example of that. What began as a practical response to tight time and budget constraints — ten posters, reused and reconfigured across every application — gradually opened up into something looser and more experimental.
Both Gidon and Jamie Yeo’s backgrounds in product design play a quiet but noticeable role here. There’s an interest in how things are made, handled, and repurposed — an attention to material behaviour that translates into a typographic approach that isn’t chasing perfection. Instead of settling on a single definitive layout, they kept the process open, letting the iterations remain visible. Type runs in unexpected directions. Hierarchies shift. Decisions that would normally be tidied away are left in, giving the identity a sense of movement rather than a fixed end state.
This interview delves into how that system came together: the brief from abC, the logic behind the poster variations, the mix of Hershey, Noaillies, Times, Galapagos, and Source Han Sans, and the freedom found in not forcing everything to align neatly. It’s a look at how a seemingly simple structure can hold a lot of personality when you don’t over-design the edges.
Amber Weaver: Hi Gideon, I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and have this chat. Before we get started, could you tell me a bit more about yourself and your design background?
Gideon Yeo: Sure, so I run a design studio with my partner Jamie Yeo, and both of us came from a product design background (technical diploma). She then went on to study industrial design, while I switched to graphic design at university. With this shared background, we have always been very interested in the object and material qualities of design and how things are used (or misused) after they are made and distributed. Working with and designing books also somehow became an important focus in our practice.
AW: Talk to me about the Open M Art Fair brief, what were some of its restrictions, and how did you solve them?
GY: This year is the tenth year of abC (art book in China) — the organisers of Open M Art Fair and the commissioners for this project — and they wanted to collaborate with someone outside of China or the region for this reason. Other than the need to respond to the open-ended spirit or nature of this fair, they gave us a lot of freedom to propose an idea and visual direction. Still, the key restrictions were the budget and time, and the solution had to be low-cost and easy to implement or install since we had to do it ourselves.
For this reason, we proposed to simply design 10 poster variations and use or tile them directly across all graphic applications, from the largest outdoor banners to the smallest fair tickets or social media posts. This does not only mean less time spent on design but also lower costs when producing printed ephemera like exhibitor tags or tickets.
AW: I’d love to understand the structure of the system you created, especially the type treatment. Could you go into more detail?
GY: There is no strict visual system to the arrangement or composition of type. We created them in an iterative spirit, as we normally do when finding one or two best options through exploring different layouts and compositions, only that we ended up using most of the iterations. This keeps to the idea of presenting ‘work-in-progress’ or something without a final or ‘perfect’ end-state as something that could be iterated upon continuously — an idea we got from the yearly colourful poster wall feature, where exhibitors would create and display their own posters using elements from that year’s visual identity.
Perhaps because there is no need for a final or perfect poster, it creates more room for designing in ways we would normally avoid due to issues around legibility or clarity, like placing text vertically or experimenting with the hierarchical elements (like making something that is not the main title unusually big). In a way, there is room for more imperfect or less ‘sound’ decisions because of their iterative flexibility, and this may have created more interesting possibilities than if we had to only make one poster.
AW: Talk to me about type choice and font pairing, especially the Latin and Chinese?
GY: The poster variations use a combination of Hershey-Noallies-Times, part of a larger project (with more styles) originally developed around the 1960s by Dr Allen Vincent Hershey at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, meant to be rendered using vectors using cathode ray tube displays, and Dinamo’s ABC Galapagos, designed by Felix Salut and Dinamo. For the Chinese font, it is simply Source Han Sans from Adobe and Google.
This selection is less of a conceptual choice than a visual or intuitive one. Galapagos has unusual but highly interesting letterforms that work for the year (‘2025’) and ‘abC’ (art book in China) — we find it also somewhat similar in spirit or attitude to typographic sensibilities in past visual identities of events by abC because of how it ignores general preferences or conventions.
Hershey-Noaillies-Times is an unexpected choice even for us because there is very little connection between the history and context of the typeface to this event, but we thought the almost D-I-Y spirit and attitude present in this typeface both conceptually in the way it was produced (also designed by a non-designer, at least not by profession — he was employed as a theoretical physicist) and visually in the way the forms were rendered with imperfect curves.
Because so much is already going on with the Latin typefaces, we settled for a standard ‘hei ti’ (refers to sans-serif Chinese characters) but chose the bold weight for an unexpected contrast with the thin strokes and condensed version of Hershey-Noallies-Times. When set together in a single line of text, we also ignored the usual sizing conventions and left them at visually contrasting sizes as if they were not ‘fixed’ to be optically sized the same way, which is often the default outcome when fonts of different languages are set in the ‘same’ point size.
AW: What’s your personal opinion on 100% typographic approaches to identity systems?
GY: We are not sure if we have a strong personal opinion or method, as we are only beginning to work with multiple languages and often employ rather varied approaches or visual strategies depending on the context. If anything, we prefer for things not to be entirely or blindly fixed due to conventions or traditions, especially those from established or authoritative typographic principles or volumes, although they still constitute a rich history and practice I greatly appreciate and still learn from and refer to.
AW: A great insight. To wrap things up, are there any other upcoming projects we should look out for?
GY: The team at abC have completed another edition of Open M in November 2025, and this will use the same visual identity developed for the Hangzhou edition earlier this year. We will likely switch out the colours and introduce another one or two new poster iterations!
Links
Images courtesy of abC, photos by Qiu.
All structures and furniture pictured were designed by studio Eki Ong.
Organised by abC_art book in China
Visual identity design: Gideon Kong and Jamie Yeo
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