Jason Miller, industrial designer and founder of avant-garde lighting company Roll & Hill, embodies the Brooklyn ethos centered on young, inventive local craftsmanship that has made the borough a world destination for all things hip. His Sunset Park studio assembles conceptual, beautiful, and sometimes strange light fixtures, both of his creation and from a roster of prodigious (often RISD-educated) designers with whom he collaborates, ranging from the likes of Lindsey Adelman to Paul Loebach. We asked Miller to apply his talent for abstraction and render the Vogue.com in electric light.
Not surprisingly, Miller reworked the concept of his 2011 collection, Odds & Ends, as the starting point for his design. “The idea I initially developed was to create iconographic forms—including a tear drop, a rainbow, and the Aquafresh logo—that could be put together to make larger, modular installations,” Miller explains. The visual lexicon we are all subliminally fluent in is at the heart of his approach to the Vogue.com sconces: they demonstrate the force of silhouette, and dispense with negative space to create something still unmistakable. The power of graphic design and in particular supergraphics—a method in which architects use graphic design to define space—was Miller’s initial inspiration.
“The trick was to make it just obvious enough without being literal,” Miller says. “The logo is so timelessly recognizable and resonant, and that was what made it fun—how far could I push the forms into shapes, not letters, without it losing its meaning?”