About

Max Telos is a designer, artist, and researcher whose work spans identity systems, graphic design, photography, installation, video, editorial, creative direction and the systems and tooling that hold them together. These are not parallel disciplines as much as they are different instruments employed in the pursuit of a single consistent variable: inquiry. What holds the work together is method.

Telos brings an unusually wide frame of reference to every project, drawing on history, sociopolitical theory, subculture, systems thinking, computing, material culture, and sound, and lets those of these fields with the most relevance to a given problem rise to the surface. This breadth is the working vocabulary of a practice built to find the logic embedded in a given context and design from inside it.

Telos’ research is not decorative, or an aside from the work of making design, art and strategic identities; a project as often begins in an archive, with OSINT, or a data model as it does with thumbnail sketches. The result is work that knows why it looks the way it does. This produces outputs that move between institutional and subcultural registers with equal fluency.

Telos has built brand identities for cultural institutions, museums and music venues and zines, mixtapes and six-hour projection installations for literally underground raves with the same seriousness and rigor. Their work carries these contexts at once and keeps them in tension, because that tension is where the thinking happens. Underlying all of it is a consistent orientation: toward the specific over the generic, the structural over the decorative, the made-from-understanding over the made-from-taste.

Their practice is an argument that rigor and range belong together, that it is possible to be both theoretically grounded and formally wide-ranging at the same time, and that aesthetic decisions are never empty because they carry histories, semiotics, infrastructures, and politics whether or not those inheritances are named.

They co-founded and run the studio Eros Works with Collin Fletcher and Matt Baquet.