NAMES: Kalani Fujimori, Zack Prucha | Four Color Kids
LATIN NAME: ef si
AGE: 24

Kalani Fujimori and Zack Prucha met each other their first year at Seattle’s Cornish College of Art, through musical interests: Fujimori is a capoeira dancer, and Prucha a DJ. Over time, the two realized their mutual admiration of each other’s design work.

“He was always pushing it, and I wanted to push it, too,” says Prucha. The two began collaborating and when it came time to start thinking about their lives after school, they decided to combine forces and go into business as Four Color Creative. “It takes a leap of faith to overcome the insecurities of striking out on your own,” says their former professor, Robynne Raye of Modern Dog. “While still in school Zack and Kalani wrote a business plan because they just knew they could do it.”

They began an intimate working relationship with the Seattlebased “cultural engineering” agency NeverStop, whose reputation for creating edgy work for corporate clients meshed well with Four Color’s drive to push boundaries, and led to work for companies like Nike and MSN Music—clients the size of which the two had never imagined working with right out of school.

Sometimes such clients aren’t prepared to go as far as Fujimori and Prucha would like them to. Rather than get burned out or bent out of shape, however, the two have Everything Is Research, a personal creative outlet through which they can realize the ideas clients reject. The first project to develop this way was Gangdroids, a series of characters composed from random parts in Photoshop, with typography inspired by LA Cholo lettering. Next was the Skullicorns project, a series of unicorn skull and crossbones illustrations, each of which represents a diÙerent subculture. They’ve also designed a slim milk crate that allows DJs to carry a few select records and a laptop (rather than carrying whole milk crates full of records as before).

Recent projects include creating apparel designs for clothing labels—Flying Coffin, Bittersweet, Dave’s Quality Meats, Rockers, Kicks/Hi—whom they’re helping develop long-term plans for their lines. Their involvement in the Seattle nightlife scene is similarly collaborative: In addition to DJing, they contribute themes and graphics packages to nights at clubs like War Room and Viceroy. These explorations have given Fujimori and Prucha an opportunity to refine their communication skills, generate ideas for the future and better understand their own design process—all things that Prucha says, “help them sleep better at night.” Isaac Gertman

TOP: For the second project in their “Everything is Research” venture, FOUR COLOR created a series of iconic unicorn skulls. Hybridizing elements from various social genres, the SKULLICORNS are symbolic mascots for the social melting pot. The template of the head remains the same through the study while the identities applied give each one its own background and story.