Johan Verde

Industrial designer Johan Verde

Johan Verde (46) is one of Norway´s most recognized and rewarded industrial designers. His design is characterized by pure, simple and soft shapes, for which he has been granted a large number of prizes. Johan Verde won the Design World Championship in the category ”Wallpaper Best Kitchenware 2007”, and was crowned "Norwegian designer year 2002". International critics claim Johan as one of Europe´s best industrial designers.

Johan started as youngster making leather jewelry. Since then the industrial designer has given shape to everything from confectionery chocolate to chairs, ski bindings and dish ware. He also designed jewelry such as needles for bow ties, cufflinks and belt buckles in silver and steel. His last known design is ”Opera Verde”, the dish ware for the new opera house in Oslo. Not least, he has been crucial to work on the design of the Onmii Jewelry Organizer.

See also report on Johan Verde at the Norwegian TV show "Go Morgen Norge": press here

 

 Industrial designer Johan Verde

Onmii Flowerbutton

 

"This is the philosophy of te fold, where ideas unfolds, turns around and enfolds. Design by trial and error as a process of disclosure"

"Computer Aided Design makes possible nearly any thinkable form, where form
also can be transformed into matter. With this process of automation it is easy
to forget the structure and lines of resistance of natural matter – its own generic.

My philosophy is to work with the complex simplicity. By following one idea through, and by setting clear limitations to the work, I always strive with matter itself. I strive and experiment with the materials, by sketching, folding, flexing, cutting and bending until the form unfolds. Inflection is a process where the norm is been fluctuated. In the place of clear-cut separations, a continuum emerges which, by minute transitions, brings about a transformation free from abrupt jerks or sudden shifts. Inflection is a kind of modulation, a fashioning, a continual and perpetually variable modelling process.

The complex/simple idea behind my design products can be the sylinder, like all the pieces emerge from in the Figgjo Spir collection. My chair made for ForaForm is based on the eclipse. When I did the chocolate design for Sphinx from Nidar, my focus is on the sand surroundings of the mythic figure, the folds, dunes, scowls and displacements.

This is the philosophy of the fold, where ideas unfolds, turns around and enfolds.
Design by trial and error as a process of disclosure. A fold which have not an inside and outside, a turning around where the fold meets itself. The fold entails clothing, both amplexus and complexio. The design of the fold is an embracing and interweaving of different things, a hinge for unwrapping and envelopment, to encircle and to turn around – like the spiral form of seashells. The idea of protection and defence is as important as that of rolling and unrolling.
The fold depicts a world that is not empty, but full, indeed crammed, packed to overflowing, in which there is a maximum of matter in a minimum of space. Such a design shows the greatest respect for what protects, enfolds, withstands and survives."