About

Labour is a Brooklyn-based creative office and workshop. We make short films, create graphics and print pieces, design typefaces, direct music videos, write music, and construct art objects.

For our clients, we create unique visual identities by combining formal invention with unconventional narratives. Our goal is to add wit, imagination, and a dose of the unexpected to every project that finds its way to our desks.

Labour has created work and consulted for a wide range of clients and organizations, from international corporations like Google, Porsche, and General Electric, to top arts institutions the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, fashion and beauty lines like Kate Spade, Puma, and Sephora, while continuing to produce content for networks like Vh1 and MTV, as well as contributing music videos, illustrations, short films, and essays for various independent projects.

Unlike many studios, Labour does not have a house “look”. Instead, we have a conceptual approach which unites and guides our work and follows common themes. We are devoted reductionists who believe in lush complexity, digital workers who embrace the hand-made, premeditating planners who build on spontaneity, inherently skeptical humanists. We seek to explore the space that exists between these seemingly contradictory concepts, where the results embody the qualities of both ends of the spectrum without landing in the middle of the road.

Labour is the collaborative brainchild of Ryan Dunn and Wyeth Hansen, both graduates of the RISD Graphic Design program. Labour officially came into being came into being as the calendar flipped over to 2008, but the collaborative partnership that birthed it stretches back a decade.

Ryan Dunn – systems thinker, connoisseur of complicated mechanical objects, and budding adventurist – was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. After graduating from RISD, he began work at Pentagram New York, subsequently working at a number of other design studios, as well as consulting for Seed Media Group and Google.

Wyeth Hansen was born and raised in Fresno, California, continuing to practice his own form of west-coast philosophy in the form of image and music-making. Unsatisfied with freelancing at a number of motion graphic and branding studios, he reconvened with Ryan to strike out on their own.

Labour was selected to receive the “Young Guns” award by the Art Director’s Club in 2008, and was named a “New Visual Artist” by Print magazine in 2009. Accolades also include an Emmy nomination for “Individual Achievement in Art Direction and Design” for our work on Vh1’s NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.

Honors:
Print Magazine New Visual Artist (2009)
Art Directors Club, Young Guns 6 (2008)
Emmy Nomination: Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft:
Graphic Design and Art Direction (2008)

Editorial Features:
Exquisite Book (Chronicle, 2010)
3D Typography (Mark Batty, 2010)
Torso (Gestalten, 2010)
Slanted No. 7 (Slanted magazine, Spring 2009)
Photographs By Designers (Chronicle, 2009)
Never Sleep (de.MO, 2009)
Graphic Designology 300 (LaVie, 2009)
Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2009)
Typomofo (Page One Publishing, 2008)
Color & Layout (HarperCollins, 2008)
Invitation and Promotion Design: Ideas with Impact
(Collins Design, 2008)
Type Addicted (Victionary, 2008)
Over and Over (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008)
Young Graphic Designers: Americas (Daab, 2008)
“Field Guide to Emerging Talent” (STEP magazine, March 2007)
New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport, 2006)
“10 Artists to Watch” (RES magazine, March 2004)

Guest Contributions:
Untitled magazine (2008)
Faesthetic magazine (June 2008)
RE:UP magazine (March 2007)
Lumpen magazine (April 2005)
CMYK Intl. Independent Magazine Festival (2005)
Resurrection Book (Commonspace, 2007)

Exhibitions:
“Artypes” (NY, 2011)
Qompendium + Manystuff (Berlin, 2008)
“ADC Young Guns 6 Exhibition” (Art Directors Club, NY, 2008)
“Dirty Laundry” (Nuuanu Gallery, HI, 2008)
“True Believers” (Riviera Gallery NY, 2007)
“The Free Library” (NY/London 2004–6)
“Lumpenthology” (Chicago, 2005)
The Unbearable Brightness of Neon (San Diego, 2004)
“RES 10 Show” (NY/LA 2004)