Last week, the prolific remixer and producer Jamie xx released a new single, “All Under One Roof Raving," from his forthcoming album. Like the music maven’s most recent singles, “Girl” and “Sleep Sound,” the song was released via a now-characteristic minimal video that animates his logo (the lower left arm of the letter x)—except this time it’s rendered in 3-D, exploding, quivering, and perpetually pulsating to the beat. Since its release, many have sung their praises for the song and its trippy video visuals, but have overlooked the hue-obsessed graphic designer behind it: 25-year-old Rose Pilkington.
Having just graduated from Central Saint Martins, the tech-savvy Londoner is a rising star in a new guard of graphic designers: those who specialize in the moving image and multiple dimensions. “I try to make everything as playful and enticing as possible, and that’s usually through the use of color,” she says. From animated GIFs to mind-boggling autostereograms––2-D grapics that look like they’re made in 3-D, like the Magic Eye books––Pilkington has a penchant for all things shiny and pattern-heavy. So far, it's landed her work for MTV, Dazed & Confused, and Studio Moross, the latter for which Pilkington created live visuals for a DJ set (“I got to animate palm trees and spinning crystals!”).
When Pilkington moved to London at age 17, one of the first friends she made was Romy Madley Croft, who founded The xx with Oliver Sim (and later recruited Jamie xx to join). She watched as her pals grew as a band, and got hooked on Jamie xx’s artwork. The song, the first Rose has worked on with the artist, samples sound bytes from Mark Leckey’s 1999 FILM Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which consists of found footage of London raves, blended with steel drum synths, garage band riffs, and a roller coaster of a baseline. “The track is heavily centered around British rave culture, and is about Jamie’s missing of home and London whilst on tour,” Pilkington explains. She decided on the theme of breaking up his logo into the shape of the Union Jack, where the shards are smashed and separated in sync with the song. The result, a color-morphing mass of faceted shapes, is as hypnotizing as the track itself.
Growing up, Pilkington was always taken by visuals, never words. Her fate was crystallized during a foundation course assignment at Central Saint Martins, where students were asked to make a piece of work that created its own, or random, outcome. Using her flat’s bathroom as a makeshift studio, Pilkington opted to pour bleach over old photographs, and watched in awe as her experiment unfolded. “As soon as the bleach hit the ink, every single color imaginable started to appear like magic in nebula formations, then would slowly deteriorate and drip away altogether,” she says. Wanting to capture the reaction live, she filmed it with her dad’s Handycam on maximum zoom. “I put it all together on iMovie and handed in a three-minute video accompanied by a Brian Eno instrumental,” she says. Two years later, she re-filmed the entire process with a macro lens on a Canon 7D camera.
Pilkington pushes her mastery of the moving image further by bringing it out of the digital realm and into the physical. Over the past year, she’s funneled much of her energy into a more design-based practice, where she produces images digitally then trans
Having just graduated from Central Saint Martins, the tech-savvy Londoner is a rising star in a new guard of graphic designers: those who specialize in the moving image and multiple dimensions. “I try to make everything as playful and enticing as possible, and that’s usually through the use of color,” she says. From animated GIFs to mind-boggling autostereograms––2-D grapics that look like they’re made in 3-D, like the Magic Eye books––Pilkington has a penchant for all things shiny and pattern-heavy. So far, it's landed her work for MTV, Dazed & Confused, and Studio Moross, the latter for which Pilkington created live visuals for a DJ set (“I got to animate palm trees and spinning crystals!”).
When Pilkington moved to London at age 17, one of the first friends she made was Romy Madley Croft, who founded The xx with Oliver Sim (and later recruited Jamie xx to join). She watched as her pals grew as a band, and got hooked on Jamie xx’s artwork. The song, the first Rose has worked on with the artist, samples sound bytes from Mark Leckey’s 1999 FILM Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which consists of found footage of London raves, blended with steel drum synths, garage band riffs, and a roller coaster of a baseline. “The track is heavily centered around British rave culture, and is about Jamie’s missing of home and London whilst on tour,” Pilkington explains. She decided on the theme of breaking up his logo into the shape of the Union Jack, where the shards are smashed and separated in sync with the song. The result, a color-morphing mass of faceted shapes, is as hypnotizing as the track itself.
Growing up, Pilkington was always taken by visuals, never words. Her fate was crystallized during a foundation course assignment at Central Saint Martins, where students were asked to make a piece of work that created its own, or random, outcome. Using her flat’s bathroom as a makeshift studio, Pilkington opted to pour bleach over old photographs, and watched in awe as her experiment unfolded. “As soon as the bleach hit the ink, every single color imaginable started to appear like magic in nebula formations, then would slowly deteriorate and drip away altogether,” she says. Wanting to capture the reaction live, she filmed it with her dad’s Handycam on maximum zoom. “I put it all together on iMovie and handed in a three-minute video accompanied by a Brian Eno instrumental,” she says. Two years later, she re-filmed the entire process with a macro lens on a Canon 7D camera.
Pilkington pushes her mastery of the moving image further by bringing it out of the digital realm and into the physical. Over the past year, she’s funneled much of her energy into a more design-based practice, where she produces images digitally then trans