Juggling full-time design work and pursuing individual projects has paid off for industrial designer Dennis Abalos.
February 10th, 2012
Dennis Abalos has long led somewhat of a double career, finding time outside of full-time industrial design work to develop his own studio, Abalos.
The designer received much media attention for his Woven fruit bowl, which saw him become a finalist in both Launch Pad and the Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award in 2011. Following some refinement in the detail of the weaving and quality of materials, Woven went into production and is now stocked at Top3 by Design, Hermon & Hermon and Sala Verde.
Woven
The Abalos studio is now in full operation, with plans to grow the brand and its product collection.
It’s an exciting time for the designer, with an outdoor metal furniture range on the cards for an Australian company, and new bistro chairs in the works for another Australian commercial furniture company.
A re-developed, rattan version of the Snug chair – which gained Abalos an international red dot Design Award for Design Concept in 2011 and made him a finalist in the IDEA Awards 2011 – is being produced in collaboration with Feel Good Designs and looks set to hit stores soon.
Snug
The designer’s career journey hasn’t been planned, he says, but has rather involved “chasing [his] passion for design and having a creative outlet outside fulltime work,” finding inspiration from all manner of sources – from “forms and patterns in nature, to being frustrated at using poorly designed everyday products and wanting to make them better.”
Cavern chair
Abalos is a strong advocate for the importance of initiatives for young designers, like Launch Pad, to forge their careers.
“I think there should be more opportunities for emerging designers to collaborate with Australian companies,” he says.
“Instead of Australian retailers/manufacturers importing all their products from Europe and overseas, they should first look to talented Australian designers who are more than willing to help, innovate, create and develop the next big thing!”
Tria dining table
Read more about our talented Australian designers and Launch Pad finalists.
Dennis Abalos
dennisabalos.com.au
A searchable and comprehensive guide for specifying leading products and their suppliers
Keep up to date with the latest and greatest from our industry BFF's!
The workplace has changed – and it will continue to evolve. With dynamism at the heart of clients’ requirements, architects and designers at leading practices such as Elenberg Fraser are using and recommending Herman Miller’s OE1 products for the future workplace.
In the bid to balance the desire to live amongst nature with the modest footprint of today’s homes, designer Victoria Azadinho Bocconi looks for inspiration in the depths of the Amazon jungle.
Bidding farewell to mundane and uninspired office spaces, colour has transformed our workplaces into layered and engaging environments. So we sit down with Karina Simpson, Hot Black’s Workplace Lead, to talk about the influence colour has on the workspace landscape through the prism of Herman Miller’s progressive colour philosophy.
Nicky Lobo, in Bologna, Italy for the Cersaie fair, brings us her second round of top picks.
Nature, heritage and contemporary luxury combine in Zaborin, a Japanese ryokan based in the foothills of Hokkaido, Japan.
The internet never sleeps! Here's the stuff you might have missed
Functional and concise, the designs of Noom are an exercise in craft and artisanship. Composed of simple geometric shapes, each piece is made in the designers’ Ukraine workshop.
The upcoming Blak Design Matters forum in Melbourne will explore First Nations design with panel discussions on ownership of identity, cultural appropriation and misappropriation more.
Ostensibly an industrial design consultancy, Tilt was born of the observation of an increasing gap between architectural ambition and construction capability. The skill set lies in facilitating the inherently creative bent of architects, landscape architects and artists with engineering and industrial design solutions.