The “Structured Freedom” of Designer Panny Chayapumh
Studio portrait of Panny Chayapumh. Photo by Thanh Bui
For many artists, life is an ongoing arm wrestle between work (the educational system, capitalism) and play (unbridled creative expression). Such is the case for the Thai-born, multidisciplinary creative Panny Chayapumh, graphic designer for the multifunctional creative studio Special Special. In many ways, her life and career have moved in this continuous dance between freedom and structure.
“As free as I want to be in general,” she says, “I do need a bit of structure to keep myself in check.”
Chayapumh’s childhood zigzagged between Bangkok, Thailand and Sydney, Australia, where she read crafting books and drew images from magazine ads. But at school, her artistic style was stifled by the rigidity of a curriculum that turned artwork into homework and measured her skill level by how realistically she could render a hand or an eyeball. While working toward an International Baccalaureate in boarding school, she chafed against the requirement to churn out copious works of art in a brief period of time.
Elements designed by Panny Chayapumh for the 4N Universe, a project by Special Special, which focuses on building community and showcasing emerging international talent
“It felt very uncomfortable trying to push all of these pieces out,” she says of her IB. “I felt like I could draw and paint well, but the program made me doubtful.”
While these demands dampened Chayapumh’s enjoyment of art, they didn’t extinguish it. Urged by her mother to apply to universities in the US, she applied to a handful of New England liberal arts colleges. Then, one day, she felt an inexplicable cosmic nudge to apply to Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn. She was accepted into every school she applied to, but she knew Pratt was where she belonged. Still feeling the push to tread a more clear-cut path, she chose an art direction and advertising program that felt “digestible” for her parents and marketable to the world, before later switching to the similarly sensible graphic design.
Panny Chayapumh in her home office, photo by Thanh Bui
Fresh out of college, Chayapumh took another squiggly route toward her dreams. She knew her heart’s desire was to work on art books, but had no clue how to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable New York City art world. While interning at Brill Brill Studio, she had met a board member at the public arts organization Creative Time, which led to her post-college, five-year stint as the organization’s lead designer. But it wasn’t until she landed her current job at Special Special that her bookmaking dreams were finally realized. Her first major project was a retrospective book on the studio’s artist collaborations between 2016 and 2022, titled A Small Pond Under the Blue Sky. She has since worked on freelance book projects like Standard Deviation, a poetry book with her friends Meetra Javed and Miller McCormick, and Sofia Zubi’s work-in-progress Sawdust, a children’s book about a princess who joins the circus.
“It’s been a nice full-circle moment,” Chayapumh says of bookmaking. “I think it took like 10 years to get there, but it’s nice to return to what I initially wanted to do.”
Publications designed by Panny Chayapumh placed alongside miscellaneous personal belongings. Photo by Thanh Bui
These days, Chayapumh is also working on the biannual arts magazine 4N, which she launched with Special Special director Wen-You Cai in January 2024. The project feels personal: Each issue showcases Chayapumh and Cai’s fellow international artists in America. Like the artists featured in its pages, 4N now has a global footprint, stocked at stores spanning the US, Europe, and Asia.
Chayapumh’s professional design process follows the “structured freedom” ethos. Her process of realizing each design is rather methodical, but she usually asks for two weeks before showing sketches—a time she refers to as the “exploration phase,” during which she takes long walks to mull over the project. Spending time outside is crucial, as she draws most of her creative inspiration from the natural world. To get closer to nature amidst New York City’s concrete skyline, she flips through books of flora-and-fauna illustrations by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. A key animal inspiration is her late pet rabbit, Wolfie, who had her own Marina Abramović-inspired solo exhibition at Special Special in 2022 and is a muse of many memes.
Standard Deviation: On Love and Loss Across Time, by Meetra Javed with illustrations by Miller McCormick and contributions from Frances Waite and Maxime Bagni
Bunny memes are the kind of joyful, unserious expressions Chayapumh conjures up when not bound by professional duties and deadlines. In the future, she plans to seek more play outside of her work. “I think I’m a little too grounded in reality at times,” she says. “It would be nice to work on a creative thing that’s just for me, like a charming little character. I want to play a lot more, because it brings out a lighter and easier side of me, and I have a lot more fun.”
More than anything material or mammalian, Chayapumh draws inspiration from words, creating “maps” of words that are open to interpretation and potent with possibilities. These “word maps” spark an obvious comparison to Chayapumh’s own meandering course across the world map, and speak to her desire to escape constraints. “I find that my mind will do a lot of jumps, and I’ll feel excited as the map grows,” she says. “The ideas feel so much stronger when they are not tied to a particular visual. The possibilities seem somewhat infinite.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
