Graphic designer and illustrator Dar Laor won an excellence fellowship which includes an 8,000 ILS grant, a personal mentoring program, and a AlefAlefAlef font library subscription for three years.
Of the dozens of nominees, the committee – which included Liya Ophir, Nurit Koniac, Anna Geslev and Avraham Cornfeld – chose Dar Laor as the best candidate for the scholarship, based on the following criteria: design skills, entrepreneurial spirit, managerial ability, vision and agenda.
Dar Laor was born in Netanya in 1988. After graduating from Bezalel in 2015, she worked as a studio designer at Re-Levant. After two years, she took her first steps to being self-employed, and at the same time began teaching at Bezalel as an assistant in a branding course. In recent years, Dar has been working on her own projects and taking on a variety of projects and freelance work for leading design offices and clients from the cultural, educational and community fields. She works with clients such as Musrara College, Tel Aviv Municipality, Casino de Paris, Hanina Gallery, Manofim and more.
When we asked "What are your plans for the future?” she replied:
"My dream is to set up a studio (da!) But the real challenge is to understand what it means to set up a studio in 2019. The old and familiar models of what a design studio should look like are beginning to look less relevant to me. There are so many new variations worth checking out. What's more, when a woman sets up a studio, it should not look and act like the other studios of male colleagues. I aim to succeed in cracking major issues that bother me and produce a type of “vision” before I start working out of inertia. It's important for me to understand how growing and extending responsibility turns on to growth, rather than a restrictive or enslaving. In addition, I want to refine and tighten my uniqueness in the graphic design field – as a designer and creator, as a service provider, as a manager and as a business owner."
And why are you the one the scholarship should go to?
"While working as a studio designer, I sometimes had difficulty with the inability to decide on a whole range of aspects of a project. Being a responsible only for the design aspect sometimes felt superficial and one-dimensional, and I wanted to be part of a more complex system. I was interested in being involved in in-depth conversations with clients and in formulating strategy, being the one who manages the schedules, the one who constructs the creative writing and marketing, and also the one who designs. I have already taken first steps and laid the infrastructure for setting up my own studio and in a short time I have come a long way, which demonstrates a real passion for the field and a thorough and active approach. I am a safe and secure investment. (Promise!) "
A selection of Dar’s works:
