Designer Darius Ou and HP PVC-Free Wall Paper Break Rules in Poster Exhibition

It has been said that if you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting. Such is the case for Singaporean designer, Darius Ou, whose design project, Autotypography, sprang to life after he found himself bored at design school. Ou began illustrating a poster a day, creating a visual autobiography of his daily life. The project went viral when he posted the images to his website. Ou's work breaks the rules of “good design” by stretching, deconstructing and experimenting with typography. “Along the way I began to experiment with aesthetics,” says Ou “and the project became an inquiry into the current state of visual culture. Through this exercise, I learned a lot about myself, my views and eventually formed my practice.”

His collection of 365 posters, created using a variety of Adobe software, were printed and showcased as part of the "Dissolving Margins" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts. Ou needed a durable paper material that would print high-quality with bright color saturation yet adhere well to the walls of the gallery and still allow for repositioning during the installation process.

“It wasn’t easy to lay out 365 posters of different sizes to the walls of the gallery,” says Ou. The curator of the show reached out to HP for advice. The posters were printed on an HP Latex 360 using HP PVC-free Wall Paper (link is external) which was “perfect for the requirements!” Ou was impressed with the durability as the posters were repositioned many times and the paper showed no signs of tearing. HP PVC-free Wall Paper is pre-pasted, needing only water to activate, making installation easy.

As more design is done with digital software, Ou sees digital printing becoming an important tool that is more accepted and used in the art and design world.