Stockholm-based artist and graphic designer Andy Voitka turns creative paralysis into a 69-page self-published book, using the stuckness itself as starting material and arriving at a maximally tactile printed object with covers made from recycled LED panel plastic.
Andy Voitka was stuck. His graduation project at Beckmans College of Design ran from January to May with no restrictions and no fixed brief, and that freedom was exactly the problem. He sketched aimlessly: circles, rounded shapes, nothing resolving into anything. The creative block was the subject before he had decided it was the subject.
The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to get past the paralysis and started using it as material. The resulting book is partly about that process and partly a product of it, drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the card-based creative tool designed to short-circuit stuckness by offering unexpected prompts. The design itself came from two physical references: paper sample pads held together with a single rivet in the corner, and his sketchbook with its rounded corners and rubber band. Both are objects that hold things loosely, that are meant to be handled and moved through rather than preserved.
The 69-page book is self-published in an edition of twenty-five. The front and back covers are cut from a thin plastic sheet salvaged from a recycled LED panel, giving the object a material specificity that sits deliberately against the preciousness of the book form. The whole thing is built as a maximised tactile experience: something to be touched and held and felt rather than read at a distance.
“I believe that now I’m secured from experiencing creative blocks again,” Voitka says.
The joke and the conviction are the same thing.
Andy Voitka is an artist and graphic designer based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Website: readymag.website/u2034181038/4332197 Instagram: @andyvoitka
Creative blocks doesn’t exist anymore, 2025. 69 pages, edition of 25. Covers: recycled LED panel plastic. Self-published.
