Six designers on your wrist. Introducing the FCKLCK Anti Charm. — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
The Anti Charm is a six-letter charm bracelet which spells FCKLCK – the name of the Antwerp-based branding and creative studio that made it. Charms are thought to have begun as amulets worn to ward off bad luck, which is the tradition this one is written against.
From the start, the FCKLCK team has wanted an even split between client projects and experiments of its own, using those experiments to explore areas they know nothing about and materials they barely understand. The Anti Charm had sat on the studio's list of ideas for years, parked because a bootstrapped, self-funded start-up counts every cent, and it was taken on in the end at a riskier moment than it would once have been, after the price of silver and gold had climbed. Six designers and artists each created a letter for the bracelet, working from six cities across five countries. “So far, the biggest learning curve was being OK with letting go,” Co-founder & Creative Director James Krüger tells us. “We designed none of the letters and told none of the collaborators how to design theirs.”
A seventh charm hangs on the Anti Charm alongside the six letters – a three-leaf clover, which is the only piece on it that FCKLCK Studio drew itself. “The three-leaf clover has been a symbol of FCKLCK since day one. If you choose to, you can find them everywhere. Four-leaf ones require luck to spot. We believe you make your own luck,” Partner & Brand Strategist Aäron Windels explains. “The brief was simple,” Krüger adds, “we wanted to make an unlucky lucky charm out of type. Here are the six letters of FCKLCK – first come, first served. Do whatever you like, and we’ll make it an eclectic collision of styles in one object.” The studio approached 16 parties and went ahead with the first six who showed interest. “We work with type every day in our branding projects, so we reached out to foundries, type designers and graphic designers whose work inspires us and has an element of experimentation,” Krüger notes.
Emailed separately, the six collaborators had no contact with each other and no sight of what anyone else was making. “We wanted something with contrast and surprise,” Krüger adds. On the drawing itself, the brief got specific: a flat vector, roughly 14mm wide and no more than 18mm high. It asked for one more thing and marked it optional: any inspiration the designer wanted to share on how the letter might take a three-dimensional shape in a precious metal.
Jewellery is never seen from a fixed angle, since it moves with the body. Type designer Tanguy Vanlaeys, of the Lyon-based foundry 205TF, started there and drew the ‘F’ to be legible whichever way up it lands. It’s built from a sphere repeated along the structure of the letter, which gives it rhythm, texture and volume and turns a flat form into a sculptural one. Over in Prague, type designer Alex Slobzheninov, who founded the curated font shop Contemporary Type and the foundry Flight Mode Type, wanted a letter that would repel luck while staying readable, and took the first ‘C’ as the best one to strip back into something closer to a symbol. It is four circles that sit on a coin the size of a 10-cent piece, coarsely brushed. The counter inside it – the enclosed space at the middle of the letter – is held up by a joint narrow enough to snap, and Slobzheninov built that weak point in on purpose so that the charm can fail. By his reckoning, a ‘C’ that has lost its middle is the charm operating as expected.
The first ‘K’ already existed. It comes from Mov, a typeface family from Studio Feixen Fonts – the type foundry of Lucerne-based Studio Feixen. Every character in Mov was treated as its own small experiment, each one exploring a different kind of transformation. Graphic designer Felix Pfäffli, who founded Studio Feixen, had pushed the ‘K’ as far towards roundness as it would go, so that it shifts between a soft, inflated state and a sharper, more rigid one. A third stroke comes out of its centre. He calls that stroke completely unnecessary and thinks the ‘K’ would work better without it. That small, irrational gesture is the part of the letter Pfäffli remembers it by, and it moves the ‘K’ away from a functional glyph and towards a logo. Graphic designer Stephanie Specht of Specht Studio, based in Antwerp like FCKLCK, drew the ‘L’ with a 3D pen for its organic, experimental quality, then photographed the result and took it into Illustrator. She liked the round trip: three dimensions from the pen, two on the screen, then back to three once the rendering and the casting passed into other hands. Specht made a run of letterforms that way and kept the best.
In Minnesota, artist and designer Michael Cina chose the second ‘C’ and sketched it while travelling, so the letter moved through three cities and about 50 variations, which ran from organic forms to stiff geometric ones. He landed on a question: what would an object look like if it stacked and turned in space as it grew? That reframed the ‘C’ as a piece of architecture. From the side, it is structural and clean; from above, it is geometric and quiet; from another angle, it is gold bars stacked on one another. Not yet knowing how much detail the casting and the metal could hold, Cina erred towards restraint. In Chicago, artist and graphic designer Crystal Zapata took the second ‘K’ from 16th-century illuminated manuscripts that lean on extreme embellishment and work elements of nature into the lettering; hers is a simplified riff on them. It is the only letter held inside a shape, and it is enamelled. To Zapata, it feels like a drop cap opening a story.
“Casting in metal was never the problem. Every collaborator’s vector went into 3D intuitively, because each letter determined its own volumes and shape," explains Head of Design Marc Ferrer Vives. “The real challenge was how to arrange and connect six distinctly different styles of letters into a single bracelet,” Krüger adds. Size was the biggest hurdle, and the finishing had to be settled letter by letter, each one needing its own polish, brush or texture. Zapata’s ‘K’ needed a supplier that could cast the letters and enamel as well. Not every workshop could do both, so the studio searched hard and long for one that could. Nine rounds of prototypes, three jewellers, two production partners and 15 months went into the Anti Charm before FCKLCK Studio had one that it was happy with.
Cast directly into the letters, O-rings join them to each other on a chain of 13 links that adjusts to most wrists, and the long end of it finishes on the three-leaf clover – double-sided, with FCK and LCK hand-drawn into it, three letters to a face and one nesting in each leaf. Every letter has its designer’s initials engraved on it in PP Neue Montreal Bold. FCKLCK Studio has set its work in the sans serif PP Neue Montreal since it started, in Regular before it moved to Bold. The six letters and the clover will each be sold on their own as well, as pendants with their own loops, and again on a necklace strung on a thicker version of the same chain. That makes nine production-ready pieces in all: the bracelet, the necklace and seven charms. They are cast from moulds and made in limited batches by jewellers in Antwerp.
The same six letterforms went into a second object: a set of ceramic bookends. FCKLCK Studio came across artist Curtis Baigent of London-based Mattering Studio while admiring a mutual connection’s work on LinkedIn. A first attempt at printing them in clay elsewhere had fallen short, and the studio was then introduced to Unfold, a ceramics studio 2km from its own Antwerp office. Wanting to explore the push and pull between control and uncertainty, Baigent built a system that generates the bookends in Cinema 4D – using a set of rules that drops the six letterforms into a physics simulation, works them together in space, then grows each resulting arrangement upwards into a stacked, monolithic tower. The artistic choices sit in the design of the system itself, which fixes the range of shapes it can produce, and every tower is different. Unfold's founders Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen 3D printed a curated selection of those towers in clay before firing and glazing them, organic processes with a life of their own, which adds another layer of letting go. For these, Unfold printed with a deliberately thick profile so that the movement of the machine is visible in the coils. The object’s character comes from the point where the digital toolpath fails, and the clay goes its own way.
Bert Depuydt, a former graphic designer with strong feelings about paper, texture and colour, made the packaging at Afreux in Antwerp, using solid grey cardboard, screen printed and embossed, then cut, folded and stapled by hand, with a pouch vacuum-sealed around the piece inside.
Photography and direction for the Anti Charm came from Willem Volker, who built a story around a cult that has lost the charm and gone looking for it, since finding it would put its members back in control of their own luck. Volker has always lived on a medieval monastery farm next to a forest, and mixing that world with street influences sparked the shoot.
The chain is built to hold more charms alongside the clover. A list of weird ones is already written, along with the artists and illustrators to approach about them, to be briefed the same way the six were. “It’s been the plan from the start,” Windels concludes. “We’d love nothing more than to launch a bunch of (make your own luck) charms. And possibly to make the bracelet again with six totally different designers. But we’ll first have to see how much interest this one gets.”