Four years ago I started Another Company, a workshop  for graphic design, creative direction and communication. Since two years I’m partner at Tenue de Nîmes, a denim inspired boutique in the centre of Amsterdam and online. With Another Company (and since the blog is almost better known than the company it’s Another Something & Company) I work for a diverse selection of clients, ranging from the Dutch stroller brand Joolz, the Van Gogh Museum, Skins Cosmetics, Royal Republiq to Nike, Bacardi and Smart. And always with  aesthetics as the core, and retail as the relevance. I call it ‘Elegant Creativity’.

There’s so much beauty around us, and I try to capture as much as possible through Another Something & Co (a quite successful blog which I started 3 years ago sharing notes on the beauty of cultures). But there always are just a few things that will stay in mind, surfaced, popping up when asked for it…

Banksy:
An image that always stays in mind is the retouched image by Banksy. Tony Blair shooting a picture of himself with his cel in front of burning oil wells in Iraq. This image is so strong, and so well arranged… The expression on the face of Blair, the proudness in his eyes in front of the burning hell, a hell that turned out to be a blatant lie to get our hands on some oil reserves… Amazing!

Tarsem Singh // The Cell:
When getting moving images on top of the mind, my favorite movie is most definitely The Cell. This brilliant movie by Tarsem Singh, where an FBI agent enters the mind of a serial killer in order to learn where he has hidden his latest kidnap victim is so cutting-edge, almost avant-garde. It balanced somewhere between brilliance and insanity with an extreme level of aesthetics.

The absolute climax is, inspired by the work of Damien Hirst, the scene where the horse is cut in 12 pieces by glass ‘razors’, and keeps on breathing while Jennifer Lopez walks between the beating heart and the breathing lungs…

Radiohead:
There’s only one sound, one band, one kind of music I can always listen to, wherever, whenever. That is Radiohead. They have such an authentic sound, unique image, brilliant artistic level, like they are living in their own world with their own culture. There is no other band or artist that comes close enough to touch the level of Radiohead.

Fernando Pessoa:
A few years ago a friend of me gave me a book by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. I don’t think that I ever experienced poetics and literature in a more exquisite form before. The way he sculptures the words into sentences, and let them unfold before your eyes in a lively three-dimensional space, becoming mass, an object which you can hold, take and keep alive in your mind. So extremely good and elevating – and so inspiring for someone like me, who solely things images.

“There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediately at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.”

A Factless Autobiography — Fernando Pessoa (Translated by Richard Zenith)

Helmut Lang // Cuiron
An odeur that stays in mind and travels with me for some years now is Cuiron by Helmut Lang. A minimalistic fragrance, starting with subtile flowers, orange blossoms, moving into the base notes of leather with a hint of prunes. Like an early morning in Spring, the fresh air, first blush, opening your old leather bag with memories and notes from last year… Timeless, subtile, masculine, and often connected to Marlon Brando and his style. All in a beautiful timeless packaging – which was evidently not timeless enough since the fragrance (and the brand) was discontinued somewhere in 2004…

My favorite artists:

Three Dutch illustrators, all with a very unique and authentic style. The illustrations of Raymond Lemstra that seem to be the masks of the moguls of undiscovered kingdoms, the sophisticated pencil drawings of Ytje that captures the almost photographic desolate and sometimes absurd and obscure situations and the the bizarre scenes with animals, always smiling people and exuberant colors of the illustrations of Ted Parker. Definitely all three favorites: Ted Parker, Raymond Lemstra & Ytje Veenstra.

Raymond Lemstra

Ted Parker

Ytje

And to stick with the number three; three Dutch photographers that inspire me: Pablo Delfos, Thomas Tukker and Yamandu Roos. All three with their own austere style, a refined documentary signature.

Where Pablo Delfos finds his beauty in everything that surrounds him, wether it is a piece of paper, or the incredible knittings of Nanna van Bladeren, is Thomas more into fashion. Thomas’ underwater photography slowly comes to the surface as an uncompromised and raw style, real, but still with the beauty of fashion.

And Yamandu has his very own story. Crossing Europe, documenting the new union, the people, the landscapes, the roads… All with an open-minded and objective eye.

Pablo Delfos

Thomas Tukker

Yamandu Roos

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Thank You!

Joachim.

(portrait Joachim: Spencer Nikosey / Killspencer)