Matt Willey: friendships and making art for good

wearable art collab

Matt Willey x Eval (11)

This wearable art collaboration connects award-winning graphic designer Matt Willey with 11-year-old Eval from the SDN 004 Mentarang school in Pulau Sapi. Eval loves to play football with his best friend. All proceeds from the merch sales will go towards helping his school.

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wearable art collabs

Eval (11)

Pulau Sapi, Indonesia

Eval is an 11-year-old pupil at SDN 004 Mentarang, living in the small town of Pulau Sapi in North Kalimantan. Eval loves to play football together with his best friend. When it comes to friendships, Eval thinks that being helpful, supportive, and cheerful are important. He also says that we shouldn’t get angry when our friends make mistakes or bully anyone.

Matt Willey

United Kingdom/ United States

Matt Willey is an award-winning graphic designer who has worked with companies like The Independent and The New York Times Magazine, and has designed the title graphics of the British television series ‘Killing Eve’. In 2019 he became a partner at Pentagram, a design firm in New York City. Collabing with Face This isn’t his first charity work. He has made several of his typefaces commercially available, the proceeds of which go to Cancer Research UK and MacMillan Cancer Support.

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A drawing based on the theme of ‘friendship’

For his drawing, Eval (11) was given the theme of friendship. The goal of the exercise was to see what friendship means to Eval and how he would visually depict the essence of it. Eval drew himself and his best friend playing football in the forest. When we talked to him about his art, he stressed the important qualities that friends should have. For him, they are being supportive, helpful, friendly, not getting angry easily, and not bullying.

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Making art together with Eval

Even though Matt has extensive experience in graphic design, he admits that this project was challenging for him. “In the end I decided that I wanted to focus on the two figures — the two friends — playing football together. That's the human moment. I adore how they are rendered, there's a gloriously human wobbliness to them! Eval wrote ‘My best friend’ close by, almost as a caption.”

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Friendship is how we treat each other

Eval’s answers on friendship revolved around how friends make each other feel. He mentioned a few times that friends shouldn’t get angry with each other when someone makes mistakes and that friends shouldn’t bully each other. This showed us that the way people treat each other is at the core of what friendship means to Eval.

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Making art like children

“Children don't need permission or validation in the same way, they trust their instincts. And they're not paralysed by trying to make it perfect. They can be unprecious about it. They'll make something, show you, and move on to the next thing. The output is instinctive, impulsive even, and not bogged down in or dulled by refinement or polish.”

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