What Is Universal Everything?

Matt Pyke, founder and creative director of Universal Everything, calls his studio a “digital art and design collective”. And after 15 years of revolutionary work in the digital realm, UE has its first book – What is Universal Everything? Working closely with Pyke, the Spin design team of Tony Brook and Claudia Klat have designed a book that successfully brings Universal Everything’s vivid on-screen work to the printed page. The book is printed using a unique salmon pink fluoro colour that has been specially created and mixed for the project. What is Universal Everything? examines 24 of the studio’s most exciting projects, from work for clients such as Microsoft, Hyundai and MTV, through to projects for Radiohead and the Science Museum in London. For each piece of work, Pyke collaborates with a pool of international creative talent from his base in Sheffield in the north of England. The book also focuses on several of UE’s self-initiated projects that keep the studio pushing forward. These speculative explorations, says Pyke, are concerned with “trying to invent the future before we get there”. The book also includes two essays and extensive interviews throughout, 90 pages of Pyke’s hand-drawn sketches, as well as detailed listings of the studio’s numerous sources of inspiration – from music to literature; from places to food. In keeping with the book’s high production values, nearly all the work featured in the book has been re-rendered at high res, allowing the full majesty of Universal Everything’s screen-based work to be captured on the printed page. Furthermore, every cover of What is Universal Everything? is unique: a different tipped-in image graces the cover of each edition. As Pyke notes: “We developed software to generate random combinations of shapes, colours and sizes with collision detection. Thousands of unique graphic compositions have been generated.... Everyone will own a one-off.”