Personal experiments Tallinn → Stockholm → New York Anton & Irene

Work no one
asked for.

Client work pays the rent. Studio work builds the name. The actual ideas come from goalless, obsessive, unadvertised experiments — a working philosophy, pulled from one hour with Anton Repponen.

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1. The frame

Design is goal-oriented and efficiency-obsessed. The most interesting work starts outside of that — you begin, you observe, and one thing leads to the next.

"A lot of cool shit can happen when you don't have a goal and you just start working. All you have to do is observe where it takes you."

Anton at a sewing machine, Tallinn 1990
Fig 1: Tallinn, 1990 — a pattern maker's son at the machine
2. Three types of work

Three lanes, one practice

01

Client work — demands clarity

No mistakes allowed. Super organized, everything planned. It pays rent, insurance, food — and nothing more than the hours allocated.

Never work late for a client
02

Studio work — allows drift

Projects the studio invents itself: research, build, launch. Long learning curves, controlled risk, work that builds the name.

Museums · Books · Self-initiated
03

Personal — unknowns take over

No one else involved. No validation sought. Dive into complete unknown without knowing whether you can build it at all.

All that matters: do you like doing it
Xbox interface, 2012
Fig 2: Client lane — Xbox interface, 2012
The Met redesign, 2016
Fig 3: Studio lane — The Met redesign, 2016
Windbreaker — a game that never shipped
Fig 4: Personal lane — a game that never shipped
3. Obsession with one thing leading to another

One experiment opens the next

01 / 05
Lasnamäe window — a facade without perspective

Misplaced series

Fig 5 · 2016

Half a year of weekends reverse-engineering perspective. Eleven New York buildings cut from the city, dropped onto volcanoes. Then: Design Boom, the Whitney, CNN, Wired, the Guardian.

repponen.com — the encyclopedia

Facades

Fig 6 · ongoing

The leftovers became a hidden page on his site: 400+ building faces photographed without perspective distortion. Never advertised. "No one looks at this page. I like that it's there."

Clock faces — the time obsession

Time Stretched

Fig 7 · 2021–

Distorting the facades led to visualizing the passage of time — pixels stretched by hand until the city breaks apart. TDC finalist, exhibited in Tokyo, 20+ publications.

Isometric building, drawn alone

The app

Fig 8 · 2025

Wanted the effect live — so he vibe-coded his own iOS camera with zero coding experience. Never launched. It lives on one phone. "If a tool doesn't exist, create it. No permission needed."

Screens and phones

The soap opera

Fig 9 · uninvited

A Chinese TV drama bootlegged one image as a phone wallpaper. The heroine gets 500 texts per episode — the picture appears every single time. Work made for no one, seen by millions.

4. How personal projects begin
On stage, OFFF Barcelona 2012
Fig 10: Forward, no goal — OFFF Barcelona, 2012

A — By making

Start with no destination. Each step reveals the next. The project is only recognizable in retrospect — "only now I saw that this can be a project."

Anton Repponen, portrait
Fig 11: Looking back — photo by @velocitizen

B — By looking back

The project already exists in your archive. Open the folders: people running, light beams, covered cars. "The pattern becomes the project, and the project makes it legible to others."

5. The rule

Everything
needs a home

Finder window — Bio.rtf in an untitled folder
Fig 12: Bio.rtf, untitled folder — a folder is not a project "It needs to leave my computer to become a project"
6. Mantra wall
On educationArchitecture taught space. The web taught feedback. Photography taught attention.
On tasteEmbrace your obsessions
On toolsAuto Layout is a killer of any idea
On the webThere is no design police
On sellingPush your agenda — with different words
On existenceIt matters that it exists