How We Work: Raw Color

As the name suggests, colour is a central focus for Dutch studio Raw Color. CR spoke with founder Christoph Brach to find out how experimenting with vegetable pigments kickstarted a career that spans design, photography and art direction

Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach set the studio up after graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2007, and have drawn on their graphic and textile design backgrounds to work with clients including adidas, Selfridges and Tilburg’s TextielMuseum. Colour is the catalyst for every single project, whether that’s photographs saturated in a single hue, or physical installations that explore our experience of colour. Here, Brach explains to CR how their love of colour began, why some shades can still cause controversy, and how beetroots helped them get their start.

How Raw Color started with vegetables We’d been asked to be part of an exhibition when we’d just graduated, called Designing Nature. It was an open call for what to contribute, as long as it had something to do with nature, and that was the start of our vegetable pigment research. We were chatting, and we started envisioning albino beetroots, and how we could make that happen. The second thought was what would happen with the pigment once it’s taken out of the beetroot, and that’s how we came up with our installation. I think it also happened because Daniera comes from textile design, and I’m more from the graphics side, so colour played a natural discipline for us and it evolved from that. Afterwards we were looking for a studio name, and we exhibition the research with vegetable pigments in Milan, and we got a lot of post addressed to ‘Raw Color’ after that. Colour is a medium that enables us to travel between the different disciplines of design, and that’s really valuable for us because we like to work broadly – so colour has been a good choice.