Founded in 2010, award winning design studio DayMonthYear (DDMMYY) takes its name from Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara’s Today series of daily date paintings, which spanned nearly five decades. The name expresses the design studio’s ongoing interest in presentness and the indexing of time.

BLUEPRINTS expands on this subject through a series of large-scale photograms – experiments imprinting time, material and space through analogue photography. The photograms were created by exposing light-sensitive paper to the sunlight and shadows of the DayMonthYear studio. Diverging from the digital manipulation and instant reproduction common to graphic design and contemporary communication, these images are closer to a footprint in sand or a fossil in stone.

BLUEPRINTS engages directly with indexicality – the relationship between a thing and what it represents. While graphic design plays with indexicality through language, BLUEPRINTS plays with this relationship in physical form, acknowledging the opportunity to connect the studio with Objectspace’s object-focused mandate.

Recalling the historic use of cyanotype image making in the architecture field, BLUEPRINTS uses photograms to ‘capture’ their studio and its temporal interaction with light. The longer an object has remained in contact with the light-sensitive surface, the deeper its imprint; the shorter its exposure, the more fleeting and spectral its trace.

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DayMonthYear is a design studio that works at the intersection of commerce, culture, and community for independent companies across New Zealand, Australia, and the USA. Notable projects include the creation of brand identities for Boring oat milk, Deadly Ponies, and Wynn Hamlyn; and campaigns for Klim Type Foundry. DayMonthYear has been deeply involved in New Zealand’s art and design landscape, collaborating with institutions like Michael Lett, Artspace Aotearoa, and the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, contributing to the Venice Biennale, and publishing Le Roy, an internationally distributed art-meets-fashion magazine. From 2010 to 2017, the studio published artist books with leading New Zealand artists and worked as the strategic and design partner for Ocula for nearly a decade. At the heart of their approach is a thoughtful and holistic relational philosophy that prioritises meaningful, enduring connections between their clients and their respective audiences.