studio catherine griffiths

Flash Forward

Invited late 2012 to participate in the Future issue (#289) of Australia’s Desktop magazine, seven studios were asked to write and make a visual response to editor Heath Killen’s brief for Flash Forward (how we might envision the future in terms of publishing and culture, with reference to our own work, both conceptually and meditatively).

My response, a piece of free flowing thought, stream of consciousness:

TRULY, NO IDEA

2030, 18 years. Not that distant. I’ll be 64, not much older than my husband now. Looking at him, knowing his spirit, physically and intellectually, over a span of the last 18 years, I imagine my thinking would not be terribly different to what it is now.

My hair will be completely silver, although, looking at my mother who is 70, her hair is a mixture of pewter and silver. Hard to imagine Desktop magazine having the same name, although the word “desktop” might imply a tone more fitting — “on the table” — in contrast to its original, intended meaning, which demystified the secrets of Our Profession, how we got from A to B.

Could this desire for “on the table”, the real object, only gather strength, as our self-inflicted Jekyll & Hyde of the virtual phenomenon consumes and controls, curates, yet liberates? Wasn’t the grass always greener on the other side? We are what we eat, remember. Could we become toxin-free? By 2030, what appears intangible now, may well become tangible then. Or the opposite. We’re sure to be still mouthing the vowels, if only to be heard.

“In Griffiths’ hands, typography frees itself and wanders across disciplines, the poetics of the letterform and its relationship to space, architecture and the landscape, with exact thinking and insightful results ... AEIOU brings about, to the attentive observer, a self-awareness, not to mention insights about the inner workings of our mind, when it comes to language and speech.” — Mercedes Vicente, for Prodesign, 2010

Much of what I make and do as a typographer, designer, is in response to the emotional, physical, social, political landscape around me. The language of my thinking is a tangled mesh of thoughts, pinned to a frame of time in space (not a time-frame), my intuition synchronised to a certain pattern of logic. To gather thought, make sense, communicate, find space to be in ... silver, pewter-coloured hair ... those things I can be certain of.

What we make and do, now, is the future. Isn’t it?

Catherine Griffiths / November 2012

Collider

Studio Catherine Griffiths

Totem Visual

The Letter D.

Smith and Peony Press

Pandarosa

Groovisions

04 writing & critique

Walk With Me
by Stephen Cleland
curatorial essay, »Catherine Griffiths: Walk With Me«, Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery, Aotearoa NZ, July 2025

Blood lines
by John Warwicker
exhibition review, »Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line«, Eye Blog, UK, June 2025

On the Expanded
by Megan Patty
curatorial essay, »Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line«, The Design Gallery, University of Melbourne, Australia, May 2025

The Shapes of Sound
by Ela Egidy
curatorial essay, »Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line«, The Design Gallery, University of Melbourne, Australia, May 2025

Read this space
by John L. Walters
book review, »catherine griffiths : SOLO IN [ ] SPACE«, Eye, UK, Spring 2023

TRULY, NO IDEA

by Catherine Griffiths

Desktop magazine, issue #289 Dec/Jan 2013