Field Notes
Twenty-one is when you’re officially an adult. Allegedly. Old enough to know better, young enough to keep doing this anyway. It’s the age where being naive stops being charming and you’re expected to clean up your own mess. By twenty-one, people assume you should have things figured out. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. Mostly, you’re just expected to look like you might. But, life’s too short to spend it meeting other people’s expectations or squeezing yourself into neat little boxes. So you roll with it, however you think is right.
Anyway… to mark this “adulthood”, we made a thing. A mark, symbol, icon, doodle, whatever you want to call it. We turned the letter A (for Anonymous) into the number 21. There are 21 treatments of it, one for every year we somehow kept the lights on.
2005 to 2009
We started by trying to be a design studio because that was the most obvious shape available if you wanted to make things. Or at least what we thought a design studio was supposed to be.
We took whatever work came our way. Said yes a lot. Tried to look the part. Watched what already existed and reverse-engineered our way into it. Most of it was learning by observation.
Somewhere in between, we started making books, exhibitions, objects, and other things that didn’t quite fit the shape of a design studio or make much sense on paper. That probably should’ve told us something.
The breaking-out phase.
We loosened our grip on the studio shape and started working more on our own terms. Launched A Design Film Festival and Bracket without much of a plan. Slowly, a community formed around them. At one point, around 13,000 people showed up.
We took the festival to New York, Latvia, Shanghai, and a few other places. It felt less like running a studio and more like testing what else design could be.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, we worked on the rebrand for the Nikon Photo Contest in Japan. That's when it became clear the work didn't need to stay in one place. And neither did we.
The outward-looking phase.
Uniqlo flagship launches in Singapore and Manila. Long stretches of research across Southeast Asia. Projects in the US and Japan for clients like PayPal and Shiseido. I spent two months living and working in Vietnam, helping a friend reorganise his creative team.
Then the pandemic arrived and wiped the board clean. That chapter ended, whether we were ready or not.
2021 to 2025
The lost years, at least at first.
Covid changed how people lived, worked, and what they cared about. The old ways stopped making sense. We put A Design Film Festival on hiatus, opened an outpost in Bangkok, did Gen Z research, and branded a mixed-use development in the middle of the city.
We published Shui and Mu. Spun off Germaine’s art practice. I started writing field notes more regularly. Took more field trips to learn from the world, trying to figure out what might come next. Still working on that last part.
At 21, a lot has changed. Some things haven’t. We’re still unfinished, probably always will be. Still figuring it out. Still making a mess. Just more honest with ourselves now, and less interested in squeezing into neat little boxes.
It’s better to invent your own game. That way, you get to write the rules and keep playing. And that’s the point.
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous