Design Studio Six N. Five Pushes Boundaries to Blur the Lines of Reality

Six N. Five Director Ezequiel Pini Shares What’s Next and the Importance of Scheduling Time for Free Creation

Name:
Six N. Five
Photography:
Six N. Five
Words:
Erica Nichols

One look at the imaginative works of Six N. Five, and you’ll see why the contemporary design studio has garnered such an impressive roster of clients that includes Samsung and Nike. But Director Ezequiel Pini shares that it’s the personal projects that really push the design studio’s creative explorations, allowing them to create highly-individualized projects that meet client expectations but also encourage the viewers to step into a vibrant, surrealistic world. With 3D design as the gateway to Six N. Five’s poetic composition, the studio has created in a variety of fields including advertising, product design, poetry and editorial. But with new ventures on the horizon, Pini shares with us a unique look into their creative process and how he ensures their team of designers remain curious and creative.

VISUAL PLEASURE Magazine: Talk to us about the beginnings of Six N. Five, how you got started and where the name comes from.

Ezequiel Pini: The studio was created in Buenos Aires, in 2014. It started just as a way of expression, I didn’t feel happy enough with the designs I was doing working in many studios so I needed to find my own way to show my own designs. Regarding the name, the real meaning comes just from an aesthetic decision, I loved how both numbers sounded. But we also have a nice story where 6:05 p.m. was the time when, after a long workday at our old design studios, we wanted to go back home to work on our own projects.

Where did your interest in graphic design, 3D work, and realism come from?

I’m a graphic designer so since the beginning, I’ve been working in digital design. But there was a time when I found myself struggling to represent ideas. The only way I found inspiration was making collages or doing my own photos. So started to learn 3D first for playing around, and then to explore realism more and more in order to generate confusion to the viewer.

Six N. Five’s work has such a daydreamy, poetic aesthetic to it. How did you develop this?

After realizing that to capture realism in 3D wasn’t our goal anymore, tech advances and software improvements did a good job on this. We thought we needed to go a bit further and to really generate something else to the viewer. A feeling, a mood, a mental state or just a want to be there for a moment. It’s something more difficult to reach, but so satisfying when we can get it.

What does the creative process look like from concept to creation? Where do you draw inspiration from and how do you first start on a project?

Real life is our most inspiring medium, so we take something we like and mix it with texture to create something you’d find in another world. We are really bad when sketching in pencil, so the way we usually start is by using our most comfortable tool: 3D. A quick illustration with simple shapes works to understand, decide, and test what we really want to represent. From there, we continue sculpting or replacing basic shapes into final objects, plus the work in lighting and shading. Once we are happy with the result and after some rounds of polishing, we render in High Resolution and work in the last step, which is post and retouch.

You bridge experimental art with commissioned commercial projects so seamlessly. Talk to us about how you find balance with bringing your client’s visions to life as well as your own.

When we are working with commissioned projects by clients we try to solve their needs and also propose our vision. Some projects are more flexible than others, some of them they even decide to come to us because they find we could add something with our way of thinking. We really enjoy these because we can get involved in the creative and concept process. But there are some others where we act more as a tool. They come with an idea, the creative direction about how to proceed, everything solved. There are not big margins to play in terms of giving our own vision, but we also love these projects because we know what to do and how to reach it.

When you’re allowed to go wild with your creativity, without any specific guidelines, what do you most love to create?

I think one of the keys from our studio is we usually generate free time to design our own visuals and explorations. We try to do it two or three times a year, and this one month period usually appears after a stressful commercial campaign. We named this process “Lab.” I really believe this period is more than necessary to move our creativity further to explore new fields. And the situation of having no deadlines or external needs to be solved gives us valuable freedom. Lab is also a good place to collaborate with new talents, so we know more people and share new experiences.

Talk to us about the transition into furniture and product design and how you incorporate your aesthetic into this new venture.

Yes! This new field of exploration also started in our Lab time, after realizing that we had a lot of commissions where clients came with their products and we were in charge of environment and set design. We decided to say, ‘why not’ to also designing the product or object itself.