Marcel Winatschek

The Geography of a Design

At some point I started keeping track of who was actually using my designs, and the list turned into something genuinely strange. Not a handful of local blogs but a scatter across continents—things I’d made at my desk showing up attached to names I’d never heard of until they appeared in my logs.

Jessie-Lynne, a model known from Gods Girls. The Pink Mafia Blog out of Canada. Chinese FHM model Eunice Lim. American photographer Michael Palacios. The Spanish MTV editorial blog. California journalist P. Kim Bui. Indian rock band Sonic Flair. Japanese photo blog Tokkaido. Musician Miss Jack Davey. Photographer Melissa Joy. A gay culture blog whose exact purpose remained somewhat opaque to me. A Singaporean candy blog run by two people called Nadia and Jayden. Austrian Suicide Girls model Miss Chai. Japanese writer Koichi. Italian photographer Alessandro Mazziotti. And Jan, naturally.

There’s something quietly disorienting about all of it. You make a thing, you put it somewhere, and then it just goes. Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, somewhere in the Canadian internet. The work has its own life now, separate from yours entirely.