There Is Now
Every year we talk about what has passed and what is coming. This time the whole studio wanted to talk about the day we are actually in.
The brief
Every year A&M sends something out as the year turns. For 2026 the message came out of the team: between what was and what will be, there is now. My part was to give it a body: the lettering that slowly gathers on the glass of our storefront in Kypseli, the posters, a week of it on Instagram, and the gift that went into our clients' hands, a perpetual calendar. A short film was made on those graphics by Tarta Studio, Jump Motion and Christos Bratsos. All of it came together in December, in the busiest weeks of the year, and most of it found its way to my desk.
The idea
The calendar was born in a brainstorm, as a half-sentence somebody said and everybody loved. A calendar that does not count the days away but keeps them: one card for every day of the year, made to be used year after year, so that you come back to the same date and find what you left there the time before. Not to measure time, but to notice it. I wanted it to feel like something you would reach for every morning — a card in your hand, a date, a small space that belongs to you. Over the years the same card gathers different days, and the whole box slowly becomes a little archive of where you actually were. Around it, the campaign carries the same phrase in pieces. On the glass of our storefront the words arrive one at a time. On the posters they gather slowly. And for seven days on Instagram they invited people to come back to the present for a moment, in the middle of a working day, on the street, at their desk. The typography is not there to decorate. It is how the idea unfolds, piece by piece, across every surface, all the way down to the cards.
The detail
Three hundred and sixty-five cards for the days, and around twenty more to complete the set, and I designed every one of them myself, one after another, in the weeks before Christmas when everything else was due too. Then I went looking for the right paper, talked it through with the printers, asked for samples, asked for more samples, and stayed with it until the very last card was in its box. It was the first thing A&M had ever made entirely by hand, in house, and I made it on my own. I will not pretend there were no evenings when I wondered what I had talked myself into. But holding the finished box in my hands was one of the happiest moments I have had in this work.
- Annual campaign for A&M Architects, 2026: "Between what was and what will be, there is now"
- Perpetual calendar of 365 day cards and around 20 more, all designed by hand, with its packaging
- Storefront typography, posters and a seven-day Instagram campaign, and the graphics the film was built on
- Paper sourced, samples requested and production followed through to the last card
- Film by A&M Architects, Tarta Studio, Jump Motion and Christos Bratsos · storefront signage by Opticom
- 3D visuals: Timoleon Giavroutas
- Intellectual property of A&M Architects AE · files are presented with the permission of A&M Architects AE
- 365 day cards, designed one by one
- Around 20 more to complete the set
- 7 days on Instagram
- 7 Greek media features
Since then
It went out to A&M's clients as the campaign's gift, and they were so happy with it. Several of them said it was the best thing the studio had ever sent them, and I was very moved to hear it. The campaign travelled further than any of us expected: LiFO, Archisearch, KTIRIO, The TOC, Capital.gr, Athens Voice and Ready2Board all wrote about it in the first weeks of January. I still smile when I think of all those little cards sitting on people's desks.