Companion–Platform is the graphic design practice of Lexi Visco and Calvin Rocchio.

We make things in close collaboration with the environments and communities we live within, believing that nothing emerges isolated from an ecosystem, and that the background is as much the foreground when introducing something new to a landscape; be it a book, a drawing, a website, or a workshop. We live and work in Berkeley, CA, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, and within what was once the Codornices Creek watershed.

A series of editorial images we made to accompany Meg Miller’s column titled “The Visuality of Mutuality” for MOLD Magazine. We wanted to acknowledge touch as an inevitable quality of the cultivation, distribution, and circulation of food embedded in the mutual aid projects Meg referenced. As human touch now continues to pose and ominous threat and many precautions have been taken to mitigate contact and exposure with food, the intimacy and necessity of touch can't be divorced from food distribution—especially within smaller, more radical projects. These images are meant to look closely at the moment of contact between organic matter and the shielded hand, and to abstract what is gained and what is lost when a layer of latex divides us from our environments.

Spring, Summer, 2021
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www.thisismold.org

Thank you Lin Yee for your kind invitation to contribute to this incredible publication, and to Meg Miller for the sprawling thoughtfulness and care that went into writing these articles that shed light on so many beautiful projects.

Fritz Haeg of Salmon Creek Farm invited us to conceive of and design a vessel to distribute the 2020 collection of seeds harvested from the summer and fall garden. It was a cacophonous mix of greens, grains, flowers, edible cultivars, and native wildflowers that were gathered by many hands over many months.
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These seeds are intended to be shared and germinated widely!
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We designed and illustrated these pieces in hope of celebrating the many species and vectors that play a role in dispersing seeds from a garden, and that for everyone who participates to also feel their role in this dissemination, whether it’s by beginning a new garden, or sharing seeds with friends to disperse and tend. We experimented with stippled lines, dots, and dashes to illustrate processes in motion and continuous change in the garden environment.

Winter, 2020
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to order: www.salmoncreekfarm.org

Thank you Fritz for everything that you do, and for all of the organisms and ways of being that you support through Salmon Creek Farm. And thank you Jeremy Schipper for your presence and enthusiasm that was so dearly felt throughout this project!
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Seeds collected by: Jerome AB, Gabriel Cameron, Nicolaus Chaffin, Fritz Haeg, Natan Daskal, Nick Gueli, Rachael Hawkins, Seth Jones, Amelia Lang, Adam Linder, Andrew Owen, Todd McQuade, Calvin Rocchio, Jeremy Schipper, Ari Shapiro, Fanny Singer, Alex Tieghi-Walker, and Lexi Visco.

We were invited by Lauren Haynes of Wooden Spoon Herbs to design their 2021 broadside that they include in each of their orders. We are perpetually inspired by the work of herbariums, both for their encyclopedic breadth of recording species (both endangered and prolific), but also the poetic perseverance it takes to preserve such specimens. We incorporated plant pressings from the Alabama Plant Atlas—American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), Sundew (Droseraspp.), Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), Echinacea (Echinacea spp.), Wild Yam (Dioscorea villosa), and Arnica (Arnicaspp.)—to punctuate, frame, and ornament the typography throughout the print.

Fall, 2021
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to order: www.woodenspoonherbs.com

Thank you Lauren for the kind invitation, and to the Alabama Plant Atlas for all that you do, preserve, and contribute to the world of conservation.

FLYOVER is a creative think tank developing research about rural design and environmental futures as part of THE STORY LABORATORY for Design Fiction, Futures + Worldbuilding at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Directed by Professor Ash Eliza Smith from the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, with lab fellow, Stephanie Sherman from Central Saint Martins, London, UK.
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We developed a visual identity and website as ever evolving archive for the research platform that utilizes imagery of the micro and macro—pulling satellite renderings of climate strained agricultural futures in rural Nebraska, placing them at the backdrop of tangled on the ground plant realties. The initiative will continue to pair artists and designers, with scientists and climate practitioners to collaborate in rendering speculative fictions and fabulations.

Fall, 2021
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www.flyoverfictions.com

Thank you Ash and Steph for all of your effort that goes into this project, and for inviting us to be a part of it.

In celebration of decomposition—a score for cyclical participation in soil microbialization.
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Fritz Haeg of Salmon Creek Farm invited us to make a series of posters for the various kinds of outhouses on the land to help guide individuals in best practices for processing their waste to eventually be used in the garden. This invites each guest to the land to participate within the cycles of organic consumption and production—eating from the garden and in turn, giving back to the soil. The text, written by Natan Daskal, is guided by Sim Van der Ryn’s. “Toilet Papers,” an irreverent 1970’s text that both traces the history of human’s dealing with their waste, and the processes necessary in breaking it down into energizing compost.

Spring, 2021

Careful instructions for how to make a pom pom; a celebration of the radiant work of Felicia Griffin, originally intended for a workshop at The Berkeley Art Museum organized by Nan Collymore and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo; now an ever present opportunity to make a pom pom to share with others. Words by the ever thoughtful Nan Collymore, drawings by / printed at @niadartcenter

Spring, 2021

Thank you Nan and Lukaza for your effervescent efforts in orchestrating such a beautiful guide to Felicia's work, and to Felicia for bringing so much joy to the world and her work. And NIAD Art Center for providing space and care for this all to take place.

A celebration of the movable gardens of CDMX. We made this after visiting Mexico City in 2019, inspired by the pedestrian greenery of the city, and the abundance of cultivated plant life that lives over the surface of the pavement. The first bucket garden we encountered there was just outside the entrance of Aeromoto Books, where we spent an afternoon sifting through their library, sprawling ideas out across their worn plywood tables, and enjoying the hardy garden that encroached upon the street in colorful plastic containers.

Spring, 2021

nan collymore is an artist working in multiple materials – gold, textiles, words, paper and time-based media. Her work can be found in galleries, amongst jewelry designers, and at book fairs.
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nan invited us to design and build a website that would serve as a home for her rampantly generous and interdisciplinary practice that spans writing, art making, teaching, and jewelry design. Our first conversation took place over Egyptian chamomile tea at our kitchen table, and before long the surface was covered by pages from Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten. An energy accumulated from the very start, and we decided that we would phase the project out, beginning with the jewelry arm of her practice, and eventually design a hub that would connect her writing, art practice, and books.
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We sought to reimagine what an e-commerce site could look and feel like to support nan’s precious gold pieces with care.
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How can a store feel like the subterranean strata of poetics?
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nan’s work hovers over the surface of shifting environments–scans from places scattered over the surfaces of our tables and conversations. Once you click through any specific piece, you enter the horizontal space of the “store” where each piece of jewelry is represented through both image and language. One can move laterally from piece to piece, or vertically through visual environments–we hope for the experience of buying her work to feel like a descent into her process and emotional space in which the work stems from. This project is ongoing, and will continue to grow with and in support of nan’s practice.

Summer, 2020
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www.nancollymore.com

nan, thank you for your trust, love, and brilliant mind that never seems to slow. We are grateful for our collaboration and your presence in this world.

Alt-Text As Poetry is an ongoing project created by the artists Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat. It’s a multi-year exploration of the poetic potential of image description, creating opportunities for practice and discussion.
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The workbook comes as a box set of two, encouraging people to engage the workbook with a friend or colleague. The repeated shapes on the first cover (and described on the second cover) are abstract marks used by landscape architects in plan drawings to fill areas of green space where they imagine trees. When Shannon invited us to collaborate in making the text into a book, we were curious to think about what we could contribute to the text visually, but with the most economic means possible, not adding anything extraneous to the content of the project. We thought about what it would mean to provide an environment for the text, and how that environment would eventually, if only conceptually, shape the experience of the workbook when people met to work through them together. We thought of public parks as places that people return to again and again to spend time with one another, and that that time is often shaped by who is present and the surrounding environment that day, much like how we hope people will inhabit this book.

Winter, 2020

Edition: 300 sets

Printed by: Colpa Press
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www.alt-text-as-poetry.net

Thank you Shannon for graciously inviting us to be apart of this project, and for all of your patience, enthusiasm for concept and color, and consistently thoughtful feedback in the process. And thank you to Laurel Schwulst and Taichi Aritomo for the beautiful Alt-Text As Poetry website, and for all of the generative conversations around how to render this project visible.

We were grateful to be invited by Diego Villalobos on behalf of the Capp Street Residency to collaborate with the artist, researcher, and educator, Hồng-Ân Trương, to design and build a website repository for her project We Listen Nearby. The project was originally intended to be a series of conversations between artists, theorists, curators, and educators, all using the films and writing of Trinh T. Minh-ha as a point of departure. Because of Covid-19, conversations had to be recorded over the phone, and the website needed to take the place of a physical gathering. We wanted the gravity of voices, experiences, thoughts, and ideas, all accumulated in one place to still be felt, but to also celebrate the listening experience that was possible if someone was by themselves, listening actively. The act of listening became a precedent across the site, recording each piece of text and participant’s bio from the voice in which it was written. A polyphony of voices begin to proliferate as content is added, and as the repository continues to grow. We also designed an index system for the references that emerge in each conversation that fill the space between each conversation node, generating a library of interconnected material.
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We Listen Nearby was conceived of and facilitated by Hồng-Ân Trương in response to the year long reading group organized by Kim Nguyen at the Wattis Institute, focusing on the work of filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. This project was generously supported by the Capp Street Residency, and The Wattis Institute.

Fall, 2020

www.welistennearby.org

Thank you Diego for your invitation to contribute to this brilliant project, and for your support throughout the process, and to Hồng-Ân Trương for all of your effort, care, and trust in rendering this project visible and sharable.

Our name is just as much the hyphen as it is the words it sits between. The hyphenated space of Companion–Platform stretches, expands, reaches, tangles, and teeters; sometimes a platform and at other times a see-saw, but always a space for practicing a hyphenated way of being in the world today. The hyphen is an open invitation to set wild and seemingly disparate feeling things side by side, opening up perspectives from which to reconsider what formerly felt familiar, steady, and contained. We have come to know the hyphen as a garden, a tendril, a hum, a hyperlink, a see-saw, and a platform.  

Summer, 2019

This piece was originally conceived to be our first business card intoducing our studio.
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A free exhibition booklet including an essay written by Kim Nguyen, on behalf of “A morta” by Cinthia Marcelle at the Wattis Institute. The dark stage on the cover and use of the Zipper typeface were in reference to Oswald De Andrade’s play, also titled A MORTA, which served as a historical platform for Marcelle’s live streams and radio play, programmed throughout the exhibition. To serve as a counterpart to the website interface specially designed for the show, we made a program that is meant to feel as though it was photocopied from a previous program, the way scripts are often photocopied from scripts, slowly deteriorating over time, accruing texture and visual noise every time they are re-inhabited.

Fall, 2019

www.wattis.org

Thank you Kim Nguyen for your support in working on this project.

The Distributed Web of Care (DWC) is a research initiative on communication infrastructure, exploring the Distributed Web as a peer-to-peer, alternative web which prioritizes collective agency and individual ownership of data and code. We were invited by the initiatives founder, Tayoon Choi, to help imagine how the aggregated titles of DWC could be rendered as a flag on the occasion of the exhibition THE ZAPATISTA WI-FI REBELLION at Naval Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. The hope was that the flags could be made as a multiple and reproduced on demand, so we conceptualized and designed a means of prototyping the flag as a poster containing the constellation of titles, and DWC’s mission statement as a vase. For every flag made, a new bouquet could be drawn to encompass the titles of each contribution that comprised the project.

Fall, 2019

www.distributedweb.care

Thank you to Tayoon for inviting us to contribute to this project.
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Print Experimentation Area, an extension and reorientation of Publication Studio SF,  is an experiment in communal publishing and printing. Housed within the magic space of 2727 California Street, a Berkeley-based an art & education initiative and an artist-in-residence program, P.E. Area is a project that helps support and facilitate the process of self-publishing: from conceptualization of a project to design, printing, binding, and distribution. We work with a wide range of people and age groups, including 2727’s neighbors, students, teachers, local artists and poets, and community organizers. By opening up our process and resources to the public, the act of publishing becomes a means of working in an inherently collaborative way—whether working with an artist in depth or helping support others in self-publishing through informal education around design, production, or distribution. It’s the exchanges that take place within this mode of publishing as a public process that feel the most meaningful to us and the communities we are fortunate enough to work within.

Fall, 2018 – Fall, 2019

www.2727.today

Thank you to Lydia Glenn-Murray, for welcoming us into the 2727 California Street family, and for your endless enthusiasm, support, and friendship. Thank you Frank Traynor and Gabe Garza for your ambient humor. Thank you Salimatu Amabebe, Buddy, Jasmine Lee, Jade Novarino, and Kim Upstill for your generosity in sharing your beautiful and delicious homemade meals; your cooking sustained us.

The Oakland Summer School is a collaborative, non-institutional space of gathering and study organized by a group of Oakland-based activists, artists, and educators. We have designed and produced a series of posters and pieces of printed ephemera to help promote, support, and facilitate Oakland Summer School’s gatherings, study groups, and expansive programming.

Fall, 2017 – ongoing

www.oaklandsummerschool.org

Thank you to Laura Nelson, China Okoye, Melissa Mack, and all of the organizers and sponsors for all of their effort in making the Oakland Summer School a continued space of study and warmth, and for all of your enthusiasm in always supporting experimentation.

Inhabiting the font designed by David Reinfurt for The Wattis Institute, we have made a number of assets that have helped expand the reaches of their visual identity through exhibitions, the year long reading group, and programming in the bar. In depth conversation, research, and programming are apart of the Wattis’ DNA, and we continue to help find surfaces and places for this language to live and be distributed.

Summer, 2019 – Ongoing

www.wattis.org

Thank you to Jeanne Gerrity, Christopher Squire, and Diego Villalobos for their perspectives and guidance through all of these projects.
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“A guide on how to develop a relationship with weather. This text is based on an observational legend named Frank who is well known in meteorological circles for how he tracks his relationship with sunlight. Broadly, the guide book makes a proposal for how we may build communication through attention, intimacy, and feeling. It suggests a new set of terms and practices for engaging with the weather as a psychic leader. It commands air as that which allows our conditions of being and outlines a methodology for how to attend to it through our bodies. This guide recognizes that the capacity of the image of weather functions differently than the capacity of the body’s experience of weather. The image is a delayed, reconstituted, and portable version of the weather that is separate from weather's immersive and tangential way. We see an image of a weather system moving across an entire region. Where is it that the image is made? Another kind of knowledge is amassed by weather and it happens in sensation.”
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We worked closely with Anna Wolfe-Pauly on this project for over a year, expanding the process of designing the book into a series of workshops, gatherings, and talks, inviting the public into Anna’s observation based philosophy, creating participatory feedback loops that informed the design of the publication. A diagrammatic table of contents that reflected the arrows used to illustrate wind patterns was first developed as a waterproof poster, and was later expanded to be used as a navigation system for the book, and for a series of posters inviting people to various programs associated with the project. Throughout the project Anna wrote “fan beams” or letters to the elusive Frank, that served as scores for performative readings, as well as ephemera that made up part of the Let’s Be Frank subscription service. For those who signed up, they received all pieces of print ephemera produced from the project and the book, all contained inside of a screen printed pillowcase with the quote “We move in and out of one another’s fog, whose fog is who's is indistinguishable.”

Spring, 2018

www.anna.wolfe-pauly.com

Thank you Anna for your energy, thought, patience, ability to listen both near and far, and for the endless care that you dedicated to making all of this together. And thank you to 2727 California Street for hosting all of the programming.
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Resting Eye Monument is a catalog of images and an aleatory index, documented once, twice, three times removed, from a performance that took place in The Terminal Sales Building in Seattle, WA, on May 1st, 2016 during the May Day Protest. Edited by Jessa Carter, the unbound book of folded sheets comprises of images by Jessa Carter, kb Thomason, Jillayne Hunter, Christopher Williams, Lucien Pellegrin, and Sohail Fazluddin, with captions by Jenn Hotes and Kim Upstill. The images correspond to captions within the index, creating a delicate precarity in the pages remaining unbound… if disheveled both image and index will spiral into poetic abstraction. The title of the book is hidden and dispersed throughout the creases in the spine. Pages of the book have been used as wall coverings, wrapping paper, placemats, and eventually a score for further performances.

Summer, 2019

Thank you Jessa from the bottom of our souls for all of the energy and effort you have devoted to all of the phases and revelations of this project.

Published on behalf of the exhibition “Contact Races,” at The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, curated by the graduating class of the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts. The exhibition posed the question as a point of departure; how can an art exhibition care for the community in which it is installed? We used the cover as a surface to provide a list of resources collected by the curators, and for the catalog to point outward, back to the network of care in which it’s embedded, before it opens inward by revealing the exhibitions contexts and contents.

Spring, 2021

www.wattis.org

Thank you Shaelyn and Emily for all of your efforts in rendering this exhibition and catalog visible, and for inviting us to contribute to this thoughtful project.

A selection of images made for Dropbox’s Dot Design site. Images were made to abstractly illustrate through metaphor, visual experimentation, and wit, a series of editorial articles about everything from design research, to how to make your voice heard within a large company. The guiding visual concept for Dropbox’s imagery is “making the ordinary extraordinary.” Often in close collaboration with Gabie Matte from Dropbox’s brand design studio, we’ve made improvisational images using materials, objects, and “visual tricks” that were close at hand and accessible, often photographing on walks together and outside the studio.

Spring, 2019 – Ongoing

www.dropbox.design

Thank you to Gabie Matte for their efforts and thoughtfulness in collaborating, and for inviting us to be apart of this project.
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A collaboration between Mascot and Publication Studio SF, featuring work by Clyde Lanier, Ellie Hunter, Jen Shear and Sissòn with text written by Celia Lesh. The publication consists of four individual artist signatures, combined into one publication, held together by a bright yellow acetate cover and Celia’s essay tucked inside. Each signature functions as a chapter solely focused on one of the four artists, offering glimpses into their research, supplementary reading, collected imagery, etc. that were informing their work at that moment. Double-printed scans of seashells span each of the artists’ signatures, providing a soft, protective outer layer for the work living inside.

Summer, 2018

www.mascot-studio.com

Thank you Hana Cohn for your sharp editorial perspective and fastidious care, and Jenna Jorgensen and Mindy Seu for your incredible support and willingness to double-print the covers and collate into the wee hours of the night. Thank you to Fennis Brown and Lauren Ardis for inviting us into this project, and all of their efforts in organizing and facilitating this publication. Thank you Clyde, Ellie, Jen, Sissòn, and Celia, for your openness and trust.

A description of a non-existent museum that's attempting to preserve the visual experience of iridescence.

Fall, 2019

This piece was originally conceived to be our second business card.

Taking after its previous incarnation as the Decentralized Web Summit, the Decentralized Web Camp sought to gather many of the worlds programmers, thinkers, engineers, activists, and builders who are working to decentralize the internet from structures of power that largely control it today. Organized by the Internet Archive, the camp was held in a coastal landscape about an hour south of San Francisco. Programming was emergent and self-organized by participants, and responded to the infrastructure present on site. We designed a dynamic and flexible signage system that could primarily be produced at the camp to respond to the changing needs of the organizers. The identity we created used orientation devices as a part of its DNA since all participants were arriving to a place in an expansive landscape they were unfamiliar with. In addition to directing attendees to workshops and facilities, we made a series of signs dispersed throughout the landscape and on trails that pointed attention to the surrounding environment, including information about plants and animals native to the Northern California coastline.

Summer, 2019

www.archive.org

Thank you to Wendy Hanamura for inviting us to contribute to this incredible gathering, and for all of their patience and thoughtfulness in working on this project together. Also a huge thanks to Amir Saber Esfahani for their energy, thought, and willingness to help construct a large portion of the signage at his studio.

A free exhibition booklet containing an essay written by the show's curator, Anthony Huberman, both in English and translated into Arabic, and screenshots from Lydia's travels to the desert. Lydia's “devastating blue,” which illuminates the entirety of the exhibition, is echoed in the cover for the printed program. The program is enveloped in the blue exhibition space, serving as a fragment to be taken away by visitors. The essay follows a g clef that moves down through the left margin, and determines the baseline for the text. A-flat serves as a baseline for the Arabic text, and B-flat as a half-step in the baseline for the English text, creating a subtle dissonance and disruption between the two languages.

Spring, 2020

www.wattis.org

Thank you Diego Villalobos and Anthony Huberman for all of your patience and care in working on this project.

A free exhibition catalog made to accompany the show CE x CG x NIAD at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco, CA, June 1–29, 2019. Florence and Elias Katz founded Creative Growth in 1974 in response to statewide cuts in services for adults with disabilities. In 1983 they opened Creativity Explored in San Francisco and in 1984 they went on to create NIAD (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development) in Richmond. Although they operate separately, the three art studios share a common mission to serve and support artists with developmental and intellectual disabilities by providing professional studio space, exhibition opportunities, and representation. This exhibition was the first time the three studios shared a gallery, celebrating a wide array of work that filled every corner of the space. The exhibition catalog served as an index for the pieces in the show, and uses a simple color coding system to decipher the three studios within shared language and a common mission.

Spring, 2019

www.minnesotastreetproject.com
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Thank you to Megan Mirro for inviting us to be apart of this project, and for their efforts in assisting with production!

On the occasion of Vincent Fecteau’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco in 17 years, we made a free exhibition booklet containing an essay by Anthony Huberman and images that expand and contract, all from a revolving perspective peering into one of Vincent’s sculptures.

Fall, 2019

www.wattis.org
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Thank you to Anthony Huberman for all of their patience and care in working on this project.