Aiyo Archive

Phunk Studio and MTV ASIA 

Desktop Imperium (2000)

DeRush - set 1

Derush started in 2001, by Pernille Christensen, Anders Hansen, and Jochem van der Spek. Their mission was to take cutting edge design from every discipline and bring it to a street level. They invited well known designers and upcoming talent to submit royalty based artwork, then turned those ideas into limited run t-shirts. Each design was capped at three hundred pieces worldwide, screen printed on blanks, and sold through their site and selected retailers.

They focused on the people behind the work. Every designer had a profile on the site with links to their other projects, so you could see what they were working on. Their designs earned royalties, and part of the profits went into the DeRush Fund, which supported creative projects and gave designers a share of the success.

Today you can explore the original site through the web archive at www.derush.net.

Tom Hingston 

Tom Hingston founded his studio in 1997, focusing on identity, publishing, music, film titles, motion, and early web design. One of his first major projects was the art direction for Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, a collaboration that set the tone for his approach to image making and became a defining example of late‑90s music design. 

CD covers from 1996

Mozart, Piano Concertos 9 & 20 - Mikhail Pletnev, Design by Lippa Pearce

Haydn, Piano Sonatas - Mikhail Pletnev, Design by Lippa Pearce

Attik 

Tom Sachs WHITE exhibit (2000–2001)

Tom Sachs’s White exhibition feels like stepping into a quiet room filled with handmade objects stripped down to their essentials, where the texture, cuts, and construction sit front and center. The bright, uniform space makes each piece feel light and almost floating, yet still rooted in his mix of sci‑fi, DIY, and pop‑culture references. The show plays like an experiment in how “white” shifts the mood of an object, letting form and material take over. He pulls you into a small space‑themed world with R2‑D2, suspended rocket fragments, and a model of Villa Savoye reimagined as a McDonald’s drive‑in. Everything is built from Foamcore, paper, thermal adhesive, and ink, giving the work a raw, handmade clarity.

Works included:

H.K.

P.K.S.S.

Villa Savoye

Prate Computer Channel (2001)

Todd Purgason early 2000s

Todd Purgason was one of the defining creative directors of early 2000s web design. As the co‑founder and Creative Director of Juxt Interactive, which began in 1998, he helped shape a moment when Flash experiences were pushing digital storytelling into new territory. His background in architecture, visual arts, and technology fed directly into Juxt’s layered and cinematic approach to interaction design.

Microsoft’s Productivity Video (2009) 

Michael C. Place (2002)

Michael C Place is a British graphic designer who started his career in the 1990s and eventually joined The Designers Republic, where he helped create some of the most recognizable pieces of that era. His approach has always been rooted in clarity, structure and a deep love for typography, and you can feel that in the way he builds systems that are both strict and expressive. Even in his early projects, there is this balance between bold visual impact and a kind of quiet precision that makes the work feel timeless. His personal practice often pulls from popular culture and the tension between the natural and the man made worldmichaelcplace.com, which gives his design a grounded and human quality.

TOBY YEUNG

Toby Yeung is a Hong Kong multimedia designer active through the mid 2000s and early 2010s. During this period he worked across character design, illustration, apparel, and figure design through his labels CUBEMEN, tobyHK, and Skullove. His output included collaborations with Vans, MINDstyle, Devilrobots, and Giordano, along with recognition from Perspective Magazine’s 40 Under 40. He developed several character series in this era, including CUBEMEN, the Dumb Dummies, and SPUNKY, each built around simple silhouettes and clear personality traits. These projects defined the visual direction of his work and formed the core of the tobyHK identity.

frog was founded by Hartmut Esslinger in Germany in 1969, and the studio relocated to California in 1983 to work with Apple on the design of its early computers. A year before the move, the company adopted the lowercase name “frog,” stepping away from its founder’s name and signaling a new identity. The partnership with Apple helped establish frog in the United States and pushed the studio from its earlier, expressive “form follows emotion” approach into a more strategic mindset where product design and brand identity worked hand in hand.

One of frog’s key projects from the late 1990s was the Clio, a writing and presentation tablet created for Vadem in 1997. Its design pulled from unexpected references like jewelry, bone structure, and modern sculpture. The defining feature was a die‑cast aluminum arm that rotated 180 degrees, allowing the device to shift between tablet and upright modes. The team saw this flexibility as a response to the human instinct to personalize and adapt the objects we use every day. Around the same time, frog developed the JPS for Moscow‑based Javad, combining Russian GPS technology with a distinctly American sense of optimism and California ease. It was the first device to merge the antenna, processor, batteries, and transmitter into one compact, hand‑friendly tool, giving surveyors a major advantage in the field. frog also redesigned Trimm Technologies’ high‑speed disk drive towers, giving them fluid, minimal facades that visually expressed the movement of data. Across these projects, frog showed how even highly technical products can be approachable, memorable, and strategically tied to a brand’s identity.

VADEM CLIO: Computer, 1997, glass-filled poly carbonate, and magnesium die casting

ULTRA TOWER AND FIBERRACK DISK DRIVES: Computer and digital rendering, 1999, sheet metal, glass-reinforced ABS, ABS, lexan, and cast urethane

Ed Tsuwaki was born in 1966 in Hiroshima, Japan. A self‑trained artist, he moved to Tokyo after high school and worked as a typographer and art director before turning to painting. He created stage sets, live painting, and body‑painting sessions with music, and held his first exhibition in 1994. His experimentation with painting eventually led him to working digitally, which became the foundation of his career as an illustrator. His style has been described as smooth, elongated figures that are wide‑eyed and knowing, with a touch of the extraterrestrial.