Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Domased (Homebody) is an online gallery of animations and illustrations where Czech-Slovak visual artists, graphic designers, illustrators and animators reflect the self-isolation. Many authors needed to comment on what is happening because of the COVID-19 pandemia. Domased tries to put it all under one roof, behind one keyhole.

Let me introduce the team of authors. Michaela Mihályi and David Štumpf are those who came up with the name. Michaela also created the list of authors who were addressed. Both of them were also in charge of managing social media strategy. Marta Prokopová was a general brainstroming support. Karolína Davidová a Kamila Dohnalová helped with overall team coordination, production and PR. Matej Mihályi created the visual identity, did the administration of the website.

The central inspiration was the isolation. I thik its smart, because graphic designers need to help people and share their trivialism and exceptionality. One of the authors, Kamila Dohnalová, says, that they wanted to point out the diversity of experiencing these challenging days.

This project helps the visitors to have an easier ride during these weird times and also helps to share tips on how to live life during the quarantine. The motivation was to create an czech-slovak online gallery where they would get some creative and collective relief through sharing. The aim was to give more than 120 involved authors the opportunity to visually comment the situation from their homes.

Facing an indeterminate period of self-isolation, altogether worrisome and unprecedented state of affairs, the creative community has done what it always does: band together and think of brilliant ways to weather the storm. Domased locks up really nice illustrations and animations which are presented on a website, Facebook page and Instagram.

Visual identity created by Matej Mihályi is simple and minimalistic. I like the wit, playfulness and variability of the logo. Its accurate and evokes exactly what it supposed to using the keyhole as a symbol of domestic hiding.

„I decided to leave as much space as possible for the individual work pieces. At the same time, the web was supposed to look professional so the people we addressed take us seriously.” says Matej.

Students of Visual communication at AFAD also took part (Tereza Denková, Matej Mihályi, Silvia Kováčová, Soňa Juríková). Their reflection was the struggle with boredom, online life and long distance relationships. It is simple and funny which is important if we want to give attention. Designers came up with unusual photos of themselves as well to unstress visitors of the website.

This project is building the database of creative people that want to support each other. Everyone struggled with something different but still they had something in common. They handled these troubled times together the best they could - with patience and creativity.