Fraser Muggeridge Studio releases not a monograph featuring 160 works, but a Crayonograph

The work of graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge can be seen on (and in) a multitude of different places. Whether his studio is working on a campaign – or a book cover for drawings of a life class starring Iggy Pop and organised by Jeremy Deller – Fraser’s eye and output is easy to spot. Even, it turns out, when translated into crayon drawings.

Back in 2016 Abbie Freeman was a student of Fraser’s in his class at Camberwell College of Art and was asked to help the studio out during her summer break. While at Camberwell, the designer saw some of Abbie’s drawings, “and I always encouraged her to draw our work,” he tells us. “She sent us some postcards as a thank you and I asked her to do more and more. That eventually became 200.”

The 200 drawings, spanning over fifteen years worth of work, have now been filtered down into a ‘best of’ collection of Fraser’s work, in a book titled Crayonograph – the smash hits of his studio’s output in crayon. Each drawing of Abbie’s has been scanned at the actual size she drew them, “and arranged on the page exactly how they were drawn – no cheating,” says Fraser. Every part of the book is also crayoned, “no computer”.

“How does an image translate through different graphic mediums? How many different variations can be produced of the same graphic form? How does this change our emotional understanding and thoughts in this regard?” asks the explanation on the back of Crayonograph; the title of which is “obviously a joke on a monograph, but using a different method of reproduction,” Fraser points out.

Originally partly inspired by a 1966 article by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes Typographica 14 titled A Book of Matches, the trio described “an exercise to take a simple object and within the limitation of black and white still reproduction, to explore some of the graphic means possible to illustrate it.,” the blurb of Crayonograph – obviously all written in crayon too – explains. But, rather than matches and rather than the limitations of black and white as the designers in ’66 placed on themselves, “this crayonograph looks at this extensive body of work through a graphic crayon lens.”

Crayonograph launched at London Centre for Book Arts and is available via Actual Source and Antenne Books, and directly from Fraser Muggeridge studio. You can also check out more of Abbie’s brilliant illustrations here.