Our Pioneer in Rhode Island, USA: Esther Eickhoff

Introducing our Pioneer: Esther Eickhoff, Founder & Creative Director of FormHaus and Global Creative Lead at Art Basel. Based in Rhode Island, Esther is a visual identity guru and brand builder who has collaborated with some of the top design agencies and architects from around the world. We catch up with Esther to find out more about life in the US and what it is about living there that makes it creatively different and inspirational.

Through our Pioneers series, in collaboration with Nils Adriaans, we catch up with members of the Dutch Creative Community living abroad and ask them to send back personal ‘messages in a bottle’ about life away from the Netherlands.

How did you end up in America? What drove you?

After my time at the Royal Academy in the Netherlands, I took up a graphic design job at the Museum of Modern Art (formerly Gemeentemuseum) in The Hague. Not only did I properly learn the job there from an amazing art-loving team, I also fell in love with the very niche field of exhibition design. It crosses the borders to architecture, scenography, spatial and light design. The realisation that I was able to merge my passions; art and design, whilst being able to play across disciplines just made something click. But, being very young and hungry to see and learn more, I felt I needed to leave Holland.

I moved to Zürich, Switzerland and took a marketing job at Art Basel to get my foot in the door of the institution. Once on board, I moved into the position I wanted and found my creative ‘carte blanche’. In parallel, I always kept my one-man studio going to be able to take on exciting assignments on the side, allowing myself some playroom to work outside the confines of a very established brand. Flexing the creative muscles to experiment with new disciplines, techniques and global collaborators. After nearly 5 years in the land of Helvetica, I felt I was getting comfortable and my creative output becoming a bit stale, I needed a change and fresh inspiration. I transferred to the States where I have been for the past 3 years. Still working very much across time zones but in a completely new environment.

What makes you feel at home?

People, always. Home is not necessarily connected to a physical space for me. There were years when I was on the plane and in hotel rooms more often than at home, another continent weekly with a permanent jet lag following me around. You have to adapt to not feel alienated or homesick. I can feel at home at a random basement bar in Hong Kong as much as back in the Netherlands with family. The people you meet professionally all over the world, connecting over art and design, also mean that you’ve got friends in every country. I always have someone to catch up with wherever I go and sometimes friends or family meet me somewhere on the way.

What stands out the most there (professionally)?

The art being sold at the fair is often dug out of someone’s basement, it is then briefly displayed in the show, sold to a collector and will disappear into a private collection for perhaps decades to come. But that moment of the art being right there, a relatively unknown work from one of my favourite artists, I get to experience that moment and I get to do that privately. To be alone with the art in this vast space and to have the privilege to see this work and take it in, that is truly unique. Every corner you turn there are secret little works and brand-new artists to explore.

Additionally, I get to work and collaborate with the industry titans in my field. The world’s best studios, graphic designers, architects, producers and artists out there. I learn a lot from those experiences, so many new ways of working or branding. They take you out of your comfort zone and challenge you to approach things differently with people from another cultural framework while still tackling the same subject together. Our projects usually end with a head full of ideas for follow-up activities, more than I have time for but it is truly inspiring.

What are you immensely inspired by as a professional?

When borders between creative disciplines get blurry and every carefully written rule in the (brand) book gets broken, you can count me in for the fun. My inspiration comes from architecture, fashion, contemporary art, film, food and so on. It can be a runway show production, a composition of lines in a modern art painting, or the structure of a stone on a building in Boston. I am always taking snapshots of seemingly random things to use somewhere sometime, often it is not clear yet where it will fit until it pops back into my head at the right time.

Who’s the best/most outstanding creative over there?

One of America’s finest must be Wes Anderson. He effortlessly merges eccentric colour palettes with mad symmetrical interiors and lush typography. He mixes graphics and art in his own unique way, watching his work is a mouth-watering experience for any designer.

What ‘souvenir’ would you bring home?

The general American design aesthetic was completely alien to me. I didn’t understand it at all; it felt loud, ugly and dysfunctional. It stood so far away from my personal style that I had serious doubts if people would even be interested or see any appeal in what I had to offer. Diving deeper, I started adopting bits and pieces, either ironically, out of necessity or simply because the clients wanted it. The results surprised me completely – it made my designs so much more interesting because I had to break my own rules, having to work with or around ‘anti-design’. Highlighting those elements instead of trying to hide them shaped the work into something truly new, like a cultural multidisciplinary smoosh happening right in front of you. Design is much more of a universal language than I had ever anticipated; when done well, anyone can connect with it on some level, no matter what their background. A chunk of the American aesthetic, as well as the Swiss before that and the Dutch at the very core, will forever influence my work, either as a deliberately used creative tool or as the innate sculpting of my personal style.