Sometimes there are extraordinary projects where it is not clear at the beginning how grandiose the end result will be. In our opinion, this project is just like that!
But let’s start at the beginning. From 2017 to 2021, all visitors of 101 Coding and Design homepage were able to create doodles on a 500 x 660-pixel canvas using an online drawing and writing tool. A brush, an eraser, a text tool and an erase function were available for this purpose. What started more out of a sense of fun in the beginning, ended up resulting in a huge archive of thoughts and ideas from an imaginary community. People from all over the world left their traces, a total of 1,163, ranging from very elaborate drawings to trashy notes, from thoughtful illustrations to inside jokes, from carefully crafted poems to graffiti-like doodles. Together, they give a very contemporary impression of these contradictory spheres in which we constantly move. But while the complexity of our times may seem overwhelming on occasion, sifting through this seemingly endless stream of consciousness is a true joy.
People from all over the world left their traces, a total of 1,163, ranging from very elaborate drawings to trashy notes, from thoughtful illustrations to inside jokes, from carefully crafted poems to graffiti-like doodles.
That’s how it felt for the initiators at the Agency for Coding and Design 101, and that’s exactly why they decided to honor all the doodles and present them in a book. “Instant Doodles“, published by Pool Publishing Berlin, shows on 540 pages a world of moods you can’t escape. One turns from doodle to doodle and is amazed by the topics and the sentences, smiles, ponders, and would think one has a sociological meta-study in one’s hands. The more pages you turn, the more familiar you become with the circumstances or moods in which the doodles were created. For example, over time I knew that a certain doodle was certainly drawn at night. Or another one was probably created in the first half of 2020 when COVID-19 first struck. I didn’t realize that one could be so transfixed by doodles. Nor was it planned to flip through all 540 pages in one piece. But that’s exactly what happened, we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the mood phases expressed by the doodles!
The book concept is likewise extremely successful. It is very reduced but still with a twist. Both the book cover and the core pages are immortalized on white natural paper. Gmund Heather, a natural paper with leather embossing exclusively available at Europapier, was chosen for the cover. At 540 pages, the book core has become really thick – measuring at 4 cm. But exactly this large dimension, coupled with a format of 28 x 22 cm, makes it a work of art. A book that you would like to have on the shelf at home.
We found it exciting to find the parallels in similar subjects, but also to see how differently a banana can be drawn by different people using the same tools.
The book ends with a 16-page index where you can look up the date and time of each doodle. Six different covers were designed, but the content is the same everywhere. “For the cover, we wanted to work with what content we already had from the submissions. This resulted in recurring themes: portraits, food, text, animals, abstract, as well as gender features came up most often. We found it exciting to find the parallels in similar subjects, but also to see how differently a banana can be drawn by different people using the same tools.” Anna Nagy from 101 Coding and Design explains.
We highly recommend this book. A few copies are still available at Pool Publishing Berlin or Verlag für Moderne Kunst.
