Rotterdam, early 2000s.

Toko, which trades as Design by Toko, is a graphic design studio founded by Eva Dijkstra and Michael Lugmayr, who are partners in business and in life. Dijkstra was born in Barendrecht in the Netherlands and Lugmayr in Krefeld in Germany, according to a Habitus Living “Design Hunter” question-and-answer piece published on 6 October 2015.

The two met in the late 1990s at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, they told the Australian design site Yellowtrace in an interview published on 23 August 2016. Before setting up on their own, they said, they spent several years working at agencies in the United States and the Netherlands. Lugmayr told Habitus that the couple had once lived in Chicago, where they could see the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe every day.

Each founder described a different route into the field. Dijkstra told Habitus that she realised she wanted to be a graphic designer when she was about to start an internship as a project manager and found herself on what she called the wrong side of the table; going to art school followed, to the dismay of her grandparents. Lugmayr said design became serious for him when graffiti turned serious and typography began to make sense.

The studio began in Rotterdam. The two published accounts give different years: Habitus wrote in 2015 that Dijkstra and Lugmayr began Design by Toko in 2001, while the founders told Yellowtrace in 2016 that Toko was established in 2002. The same pair of sources also differ on the move to Australia. Habitus dated the relocation to Sydney to 2007; in the Yellowtrace interview the founders gave 2006. Lugmayr told Yellowtrace that friends in the Netherlands had called the move to Australia a mistake when the couple announced their plan, and both founders later looked back on the move as a mistake that turned out well.

A Sydney studio and a print gallery.

In Sydney the studio settled in Rushcutters Bay, where the founders described running Toko from their office with a compact team in 2016. They told Yellowtrace that Design by Toko builds brands and identities, designs books, campaigns, signage and exhibitions, and develops websites and brand strategies, working across branding, digital, spatial and print design. The site’s introduction described the studio as working in the varied domain of commerce and culture. In the same interview the founders said they had been able to practise design independently as Toko for almost fifteen years.

The couple added a second business under the same name. Habitus reported in October 2015 that they had recently begun Print Gallery by Toko, an online store selling limited-edition serigraphs, screen prints and lithographs to architects, interior designers, stylists and commercial showrooms. In 2016 they told Yellowtrace that the works were mostly vintage and acquired from auctions, galleries and collectors, and that the selection paid homage to minimalism, op and pop art, concrete art, hard-edge painting, the Zero movement and late modernism. They said they hoped to offer a more affordable alternative to the general art gallery and to give access to artists and movements rarely seen in Australia, and that a new Print Gallery show in Sydney was in preparation.

Art runs through how the founders describe their own approach. They told Yellowtrace that they approach every project from a conceptual point of view, that they are not interested in trends, and that while their work could be called minimal they prefer to call it honest. Look and feel, they said, is only a small part of the process and follows from the concept: form follows function. They named artists and architects they admire, among them François Morellet, Otto Piene, Sol LeWitt, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra and Joseph Beuys, and Lugmayr told Habitus that Piene was his favourite artist.

They were also direct about the industry. In the 2016 interview the founders said that the ease with which creatives borrow from colleagues was one of their deepest frustrations, and that they would like to see a form of accreditation for designers, as exists in architecture. They added that running a business is about running a business, and not so much about creativity.

Names, websites and offices.

Design studios in Latin America and Australia build their own identities from a small set of surfaces. The first is the name. Some studios carry a founder’s name, which puts a person at the front of the business; others choose a short invented word or a pair of letters, which leaves room for new partners, new offices and changes of ownership. When a founder’s name is later shortened or reframed, the change itself becomes part of the studio’s story.

The second surface is language. Studios that work across borders often publish their websites in two languages, and the choice of which language comes first, and how the two sit side by side, says something about the audience a studio expects. A short coined name tends to read the same in Spanish, Portuguese and English, which is one reason such names travel well.

The third surface is the work. Case studies on a studio’s website, studio books and printed publications act as portfolio and advertising at once. How a studio photographs, writes up and orders its client projects often says more about its identity than its own logo does.

Client work, dated.

Public work in Sydney features in both interviews. Yellowtrace listed among Toko’s clients in 2016 the City of Sydney, the White Rabbit Gallery, the furniture retailer Cult, Workshopped, The Office Space and Future City, and illustrated a Ride / Walk campaign concept and design for the City of Sydney, alongside artwork and identity design for the city. It also showed signage for Centenary Square in Parramatta.

Furniture and exhibition projects appear in the same pages. For a charity event by Cult and Republic of Fritz Hansen, in which Australian creatives reinvented the Series 7 chair, Toko designed the branding and exhibition. For a later event by Cult and Carl Hansen & Søn, the studio was one of fourteen designers asked to reinterpret Hans J. Wegner’s CH33 chair. Yellowtrace also showed exhibition branding for a Danish design show, branding and spatial design for Kingspan, and an invitation and poster for the AGDA event Extra Bold Extended in Hobart.

The founders named one project as their favourite. They told Yellowtrace that it was their work with Anthony Burke and Gerard Reinmuth, the creative team responsible for the Australian exhibition at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale, for which Toko designed the exhibition and identity, and said its complexity and scope made it a demanding commission. The same interview showed a 4,716-page book that Toko made at the invitation of the China International Design competition and exhibition at the Capital Museum of China in Beijing, marking each Dragon year since the calendar’s traditional starting point.

Smaller, more tactile commissions sit alongside these. Yellowtrace showed identity and packaging for Circuit, a wine from the Waipara Valley in North Canterbury, New Zealand, and a book sleeve for the photographic portfolio of Juliet Taylor, poured by hand in two tones of coloured resin. In 2015 the founders told Habitus about the Hill Street Bonfire, a four-metre sculpture built from replica furniture for the Hill Street precinct during Sydney Indesign 2015, made with Arthur G, Euroluce, Workshopped and Luxmy Furniture and with help from students of the Whitehouse Institute of Design.

For a design guide, Toko shows how a studio can keep a short, neutral name and an art-led, conceptual method while moving between continents. Compare Studio Ongarato, an Australian studio that also works across graphics and space, and Frost*collective. For this guide we use black, grey and signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Toko’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.