Critique - The magazine of graphic design thinking

CRITIQUE QUUE The magazine of graphic design thinking

AWARENESS ISSUE 01 - SPRING 2018

CONTENTS Start

16 Welcome Francesca Calloni

18 About awareness Giorgia Monostrulli

SECTION 1 DESIGN THINKING

How did designers start having a good impact on our world?

27 Don’t be a Mad Man Rick Poynor

31 When graphic is reasoning Mario Piazza

SECTION 2 DESIGN BY RECOVERY

39 Can graphic design save your life?

Jenny Brewer

47 Campaign: when it happens here Giorgia Monostrulli

Can mistakes be considered as the beginning of something new?

57 If errors become art Marco F. Picasso

63 Vince Frost Frost*Collective Interview

SECTION 3 LEARNING WITH DESIGN

Can we find a way to use design for an educational purpose?

77 Dyslexie font Richard Gray

83 Neville Brody Andy Butler Interview

91 Playing with meanings Rebecca Fulleylove

97 You can’t learn design online Antony Wood

SECTION 4 UTOPIA AND DESIGN

Will evolution of design technologies improve the world?

105 The making of typographic human Ellen Lupton

113 Difference between web aspects S. Marsiglia & L. Zanati

119 AI and the future of design Rob Girling

123 Braille Neue font Mark Wilson

SECTION 5 ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

Can design and environment work strictly together?

133 Design Takes on Human Survival L. Drouet & O. Lacrouts

137 Popsicles of polluted water Elle Hunt

End

145 Milano Studio tour

Monica Moramarco

152 Books in brief Giorgia Monostrulli

156 Events guide

Andrea Giubbolini

COLOPHON Editor Francesca Calloni Communication designer from Politecnico di Milano Vice editor Giorgia Monostrulli Communication designer from Politecnico di Milano Art director Monica Moramarco Communication designer from Politecnico di Milano Art editor Giulia Tuninetti Product designer from Politecnico di Milano Picture editor Andrea Giubbolini Industrial designer from Design Campus in Florence Web editor Beatrice Borghi Product designer from Politecnico di Milano Price 20 € Postmaster via Candiani 72 20058 Milan Typography Circular Std Freight Text Timmons NY Press Tipografia Legatoria Molteni Cantù Number Issue 01 Paper Color Copy 120gr Cover: Plike 300gr Cover “Unlawful Firing”

by Schmitz Stephan

Welcome Francesca Calloni About awareness Giorgia Monostrulli

Welcome Francesca Calloni

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When Critique: The Magazine of Graphic Design Thinking premiered in the summer of 1996, its founder, Marty Neumeier, was reacting against the fact that most professional journals revolved around personalities, techniques, materials and awards. Before launching, Paul Rand had urged him to go against the grain and tell designers what they should know about being designers in terms of concept, strategy and discipline, all elements he believed were missing from design journals. Actually, there were other magazines with strong critical stances, but none branded itself with as demonstratively audacious a title as Critique.

CRITIQUE SPRING 2018

Yet Neumeier’s definition of criticism was more a pratical voice than an academic or theoretical one. The criticism could be as withering as it was refreshing - and it was always aimed at veterans who could take it. Neumeier insisted that the design of the magazine remain in the background. “We didn’t want our own graphics to compete with the work and ideas we were showcasing. In later seemed unnecessarily strict, because in the last few years we cut loose a bit and the response was uniformly encouraging.”

As Critique moved forward, the editorial got more daring. Every issue posed a distinctly pragmatic question in the form of a theme.

Competitions were incomeproducers for many design magazines at that time. Neumeier still had to infuse his own capital into the endeavour. The magazine never managed to attract more than 4000 subscribers, and Critique ended in 2001 because, said Neumeier “a high-quality, high-content, high-ticket magazine would be untenable in the info-is-free digital age”.

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ABOUT AWARENESS

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EDITORIAL

In 1996 Marty Neumeier argued: “There was no criticism, no discussion of the experience of being a designer” and so he decided to create Critique: The Magazine of Graphic Design Thinking. He imagined a journal that would tell designers what they should know about concept, strategy and discipline. Critique ended in 2001, but now we want to start again by revisiting the old layout but maintaining the purpose of “debunking a lot of the priesthood nonsense of current design, while honoring the true geniuses of the profession” as Neumeier had dreamed in his great project. Every issue will analyze a specific theme which is essencial in Design: in this one the focus is on the concept of awarness.

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About awareness Giorgia Monostrulli The principles of Design we’re used to talking about aren’t really principles at all. They are usually methods or rules of thumb about design. They aren’t about awareness, about ethics. It’s disturbing that no earlier than the mid-1990s ethics was a formal study in design at all. To be a designer requires principles, because you have to guide what the interactions between people should be and between people and word that surround them.

The principles we use should organize our designs and ground us. If we discuss awareness well, we address issues of form, methods, and techniques.

We need to ask ourselves how do we use our talents and to what ends?

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Some principles, causes, and values in Design:

Awareness is a relative concept: it may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral feeling or on external events by way of sensory perception.

It could be explained as the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events.

By creating more awareness in one’s inner world, people would become aware of a larger range of options in how to respond to situations and make decisions and they would gain a more thorough understanding of the impacts of their choices and behaviors on themselves and the world at large.

1. Good: Affirms the proper place of human beings in the spiritual and natural order of the world.

4. Satisfying: Fulfilling the physical, psychological, and social needs of human beings.

5. Honesty: it does not attempt to manipulate the user with promises that cannot be kept.

6. Understandability: it clarifies the project’s structure.

Better still, it can make the project talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

7. Conscious: education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.

8. Simplicity: less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the projects are not burdened with non-essentials.

Back to purity.

But to conclude, why be a designer? It goes back Seamus Heaney’s argument about doing poetry: the way something is made ends up having a grounding that goes beyond pleasure to wisdom and connects to the outer world. If we do our art well, its value becomes apparent and we are asked to do more.

And in doing (and our core competence, making things), we can change the world.

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ABOUT AWARENESS

In recent years, designers have shown an increased awareness towards social responsibility: while they try as much as possible to incorporate social responsibility into their work, there is always the dilemma of how to embrace ethical design practice.

Awarness should be the principal mark of style.

Insofar as design is communication, awarness can only be a virtue. This is the point of departure of this first issue of the new Critique. So the purpose of Critique is simple: to analyze from a critical point of view different aspects of awarness in communication design nowadays. From an historical point of view passing through typography, design thinking, educational and graphic subjects this issue will give you awareness of what awareness means.

3. Useful: Supporting human beings in the accomplishment of their intentions.

EDITORIAL

How do we begin embodying the new social agreements, even as we are unfolding them?

If we’re birthing genuinely new forms for how civilization could operate, how do we mentally prepare for that? How do we guide ourselves through the transition that requires not just using new tools, but a restructuring and reorientation of our awareness, and how we contextualize ourselves within the greater whole? We don’t get to just switch out tools, while remaining the same kind of people, thinking the same things about how things work, and acting the same, and expect that some external fix is going to magically make things change. The reality is that a shift in awareness happens first, and the new behaviors and practices grow from that. So we’re not necessarily looking for a lateral shift in thinking from one camp of thinking to the next, from an old paradigm to a new one.

2. Just: Supporting equitable and ethical relationships among human beings.

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The line of silence - work

by Cristiana Couceiro, illustrator and designer, living in Lisbon, Portugal.

There’s a thin line between consciousness and blindness. Listen. Watch. Be aware. And by and by a different quality of being arises in you which is neither the body nor the feelings nor the thoughts.

WA different pillar of flame starts gathering within you and becomes more and more crystallized. As this awareness becomes crystallized, for the first time you will feel more and more that you are. Consciousness, worldviews and intentionality manifest themselves through design, and the designs thus created in turn shape the way we see the world. At the downstream end of this process our cultural artifacts, institutions, patterns of production, and consumption express intentionality materially. The line is between a good change and an empty way of approaching reality.

Here stands the foundamental difference.

Here stands the Design.

DESIGN THINKING

How did designers start having a good impact on our world?

Don’t be a Mad Man Rick Poynor When graphic is reasoning Mario Piazza Can graphic design save your life?

Jenny Brewer Campaign: when it happens here Giorgia Monostrulli

Rick Poynor

don’t be a mad man When social design defines a new kind of designer, the story about William Drenttel, the past director of Design Observer

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This is not a simple story, but it has a simple lesson.

What does it mean to be a designer nowadays?

Can we learn to be aware designers, attentive to the world around us and able to get out of the logic of sales that often fold design? This is the story of one of us, of a designer that made it.

Many of us know the Mad Men series and hail it as a nuanced, incisive portrait of the changing landscape of advertising and society in the 1960s, with the ads reflected the values of sexism and racism – and you can see those values changing in the actual commercials. The ads are a time capsule, and they are sometimes funny and sometimes horrifying, because they reflect our values during that period. But is this really being a designer? Does it mean pushing people to buy, spend, and be influenced by a certain model that is sold to them? Beyond agencies, is there a way to make design that is aware?

Can design be an instrument that really changes the world in a positive way?

William Drenttel was a designer, theorist and publisher recognized for advancing critical thinking about design; for his long-standing commitment to integrating design strategy into organizations; for expanding design’s role in social innovation; for his work as cofounder, editor and publisher of Design Observer. And for the foundation of Winterhouse, a community of practice of design educators and practitioners committed to inspiring one another, sharing best practices, and developing new methodologies and tools to promote excellence in design education for social impact.

He started to work at Compton, but he took him a decade on Madison Avenue to realize that he didn’t want to be a Mad Man, despite the thrill of the kill, the pitches, the travel. He actually came to hate advertising. He thought branding is generally a plague on the earth. He was so glad to be a designer, hardly sin-free, but closer to making things where he can say they are what they are, and not something delivered to him in a black bag in some airport.

In 1985, he quit his job at Saatchi to start Drenttel Doyle Partners, a design firm with Stephen Doyle. But it was only when Drettnel met Jessica Helfand, his future business partner and wife, that he started to ask himself what it means to be a designer. It was clear from the start this partnership would be different. Their partnership would be just the two of them and a few helpers.

Within a year, they moved to the remote town of Falls Village, Connecticut, where they had discovered a place they could live and work, the modernist 1932 painting studio of Radio City Music Hall muralist Ezra Winter. It was the studio that gave their business its name: Winterhouse. And it was thanks to this Studio that Drenttel could found the answer about the design’s problem, that was more than making beautiful things, design should be asking questions about how can positively impact the world around us.

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Indeed, the aim of the Winterhouse Institute was, and is, to develop new methodologies and tools to promote excellence in design education for social impact across the design industry. They argue the vocabulary of social innovation, collaborative systems, and systemic change. They envision designing methods for poverty alleviation, social justice, and sustainable environments. And at every turn there were nagging questions, challenges without obvious answers. Questions that each of us should ask ourselves: how do we capture innovations and replicate them? Can we collaborate across the spectrum of design methodologies and genres to generate deeper, larger, longer-lasting solutions? How can we create programs and solutions of a scale commensurate with the scale of the actual problems confronting us?

Cover: Think again? don’t judge too quickly Illustration by BLIND to reflect and think critically before drawing conclusions

This is what Drenttel has taught us. His individual history, so deep and expansive, has given him imagination. His experiences in the world of culture and commerce, where he learned what he wanted to do and what he didn’t want to do, have given him conviction. His trust in his audiences, in his collaborators and, most of all, in his wife and partner has given him optimism.

All of these things have brought this designer to a place in his life where making great, important design can seem like the simplest thing in the world.

And this is his lesson: you can just keep doing it as long as it’s fun. And if you’re lucky, it always will be. But it’s important to become aware of who you are and how you can impact the world around you. It’s important to be aware that design can change the world, and especially, that good design can improve it, can make society better and can influence our lives. The story of William Drenttel is not just a story of a man who knew how design could be a tool to save the world, but perhaps, this Mad Man story is really about a person being saved by good design.

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DESIGN THINKING

Together, the three initiatives allowed Drenttel to build a network of social-design experts from different corners of a large, undefined territory and create structures for pooling and perpetuating their knowledge.

Impatient with the impractical, he insisted that the 2009 Aspen Design Summit focus on six concrete social-design problems dealing with issues from preventative health actions to childhood education. Attendees, both designers and stakeholders, were required to hammer out realistic plans for ameliorative measures that could be accomplished in the next 18 months. It was an ambitious, even impossible, goal, but Bill was determined not to lead a conference that was all talk and no action.

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Drenttel had since come to believe that social design defines a new kind of designer. It needs to be expansively conceived beyond trained designers to include end users and social participants. Social design cannot be a subspecialty of the design profession (like graphic design, package design, product design, service design, and so on), but is a larger activity that depends upon design in all its forms — thought, processes, tools, methodologies, skills, histories, systems—to contribute to the needs of a larger society. It implies at once an attitude and an approach to life: as such, it can help us frame how we want to live in the future. It is therefore inherently pragmatic and results-oriented, simultaneously humble and ambitious, and fundamentally optimistic and forward-looking. Winterhouse, deliberately, has followed no recognizable model. Yet the firm’s output has been prodigious. In 2009, Drenttel scored a coup that took him into another new direction: he secured a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to develop design strategies for social innovation. Being Bill, he proposed not one but three initiatives, which he engineered to work in concert: a conference on social design, which took place, in partnership with AIGA, at Aspen in November 2009; a series of social-design case studies developed with the Yale School of Management, where he was an adjunct faculty member; and a channel of Design Observer, called Change Observer, that served as an online platform for social-design journalism.

Mario Piazza

WHEN GRAPHIC IS REASONING Milan Metro projects made by the author of Italian renewal Bob Noorda

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The experience of Noorda moves in the direction of rational approach of Dutch education, is expressed in a very controlled graphics, built on visual themes if we want simple, but clear and able to hold the field, the space of the artifact. It is a synthetic graphic, based on reasoning, on the need for a balance to be achieved.

Born in Amsterdam in 1927, Bob Noorda died in 2010 in Milan.

The city which he chose to be “from” because – he explained – “design lives here” and he was awarded the Compasso d’Oro four times and granted an honorary degree from Milan’s Polytechnic University. A master of visual communication, Noorda called himself a free spirit: “I have always considered myself freelance even when I was art director at Pirelli, because I’ve been a free man my entire life,” he said to Francesco Dondina, in an interview for a book published by Editrice San Raffaele. Considered one of the principal creators of the renovation of Italian graphic design, in a career over 50 years long, he designed more than 150 brands known around the world – among them: Coop, Touring Club, Eni, Enel, Rinascente – Noorda is a legend in the world of graphics and design. Those who knew him described him as a happy man, ironic and elegant, with an irresistible northern charm, capable even – which doesn’t hurt – of combining rigour and fun. A quality, which combined with his inventiveness and his talent, entitled him to work with the best clientele, such as Pirelli in the ‘50’s, and from then on, with almost all of the major Italian businessmen who decided to entrust their image to him. Those who knew him described him as a happy man, ironic and elegant, with an irresistible northern charm, capable even – which doesn’t hurt – of combining rigour and fun. A quality, which combined with his inventiveness and his talent, entitled him to work with the best clientele above all the world.

He was always in search for a formal order that is never trivial, solved with an iconic predominantly abstract approach but also easy to decode.

The visual horizon of Noorda is really far from the pictorial approach, it is a new tradition that surprisingly is able to measure itself also with the nascent culture of mass consumption. Use photography, the visual document, but the constructive system is abstract. A hidden and reasoning order that superintends and explains the graphic clarity of Noorda, his need to work for systems and functions. He was responsible for the signing system of the Milan’s underground (1962), innovative enough to also be used in New York and Sao Paulo, as well as in London and Naples; the co-ordinated image of Feltrinelli; the logo for Mondadori; the pictogram designed for Agip; the corporate image of Dreher beer; and the Lombardy Region’s emblem (designed with Pino Tovaglia and Roberto Sambonet), the project for the Vallecchi Editions. The biggest legacy left to us by the designer, who died in Milan in 2010, is the theorization of the fundamental importance of corporate culture for the design.

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Cover: Milano Metro photography

ARTICLE DESIGN THINKING

Old portait Bob Noorda photographed

by Carla Carati

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There is no need to look for the novelty, the surprise at all costs, the originality, the effect.

Instead, try to find the strong idea behind a fact. – Bob Noorda

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It was the possibility of developing the graphic signage project which could last in time and really change the face of his beloved city that convinced Bob Noorda to take part in the project for the Milan Metro. It can be said that, had it not been for the foresight of the Studio Albini, Milan and the world would have missed the opportunity to see an important project realized.

Simplicity, clarity and use of less colors possible. With these premises, Bob Noorda faced the design of the Milanese Metro signage.

“Albini has been commissioned to build these stations for architectural design and interior design. He understood immediately - and this was the beauty of Albini - the importance of creating a homogeneous system. So he asked me to join the working group from the beginning, to study everything. Usually it happens that an architect who has a similar task projects everything, to the point where it is necessary for someone else to make the signs for the different information; instead Albini immediately called me, as soon as I received the assignment, and everything was born, reasoning together on what was to be done”.

At the level of the quay, an extraordinary invention was to repeat every five meters, on the colored strip the name of the station, so that users, with the moving train, could immediately read in which station they were stopping. The need to ensure maximum readability within the system of bands designed by him, led Noorda to draw 64 different letters and signs by hand, redesigning Helvetica according to its needs. “I started from an existing character, Helvetica, which at the time was also quite new. By doing some tests, however, I had to use this white character on a red background, that is, in negative. Taking Helvetica on this background, the light was too light, the black became too light, because the negative effect is always that the character widens optically. I have therefore shortened all the descendants and ascendants of the letters, so that the eye of the character is larger.

This solution on the continuous band worked much better.”

Among the tasks assigned to Bob Noorda as part of the signage project, there was also the design of the Milan Metro logo. In fact, its version was never used. Noorda proposed a logo with two “M” specular in white on a red background, to indicate the above and below, in a fancy character that in the forms reminded the tubular structure of the handrail. The design of Milan Metro signage represented then, and still represents today, a pioneering example of an organic system that integrates architectural, graphic and furnishing elements; it shows how design can be good if it is aware of the functions and the context.

The coherence between architecture and graphics, made possible only thanks to the coordinated intervention, since the first working phases of Studio Albini and Bob Noorda has allowed the achievement of an extraordinary design result, which has become a source of inspiration all over the world, such as to to be awarded in 1964 with the Compasso D’Oro for the quality of the architecture and the signal system.

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Milan Metro Red Conciliazione and San Babila Metro stop from Fondazione Franco Albini

ARTICLE DESIGN THINKING

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Jenny Brewer

Can graphic design save your life?

Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright’s exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London

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Graphic design plays a part in almost every area of our daily lives. But can it actually save your life?

Comprising over 200 objects including hardhitting posters, illuminated pharmacy signs and digital teaching aids, “Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?” considers the role of graphic design in constructing and communicating healthcare messages around the world, and shows how graphic design can be used to persuade, to inform and to empower.

This exhibition highlights the widespread and often subliminal nature of graphic design in shaping our environment, our health and our sense of self.

Wellcome Collection has opened a major new exhibition exploring the relationship between graphic design and health. The show was the idea of GraphicDesign& and is curated by founders graphic designer Lucienne Roberts and educator Rebecca Wright, programme director of the Graphic Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins, who together founded publisher Graphic Design&. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, it will feature work from influential figures in graphic design from the 20th century, as well as from studios and individual designers working today. It features 200 objects spanning packaging, posters, signage, brand identities, flags, and more, highlighting “the widespread and often subliminal nature of graphic design in shaping our environment, our health and our sense of self”. The book that accompanies the show is published by GraphicDesign& and unusually includes contributor answers to the question posed by the title. Lucienne’s studio, LucienneRoberts+ worked on the 2F design of the exhibition with 3D by Universal Design Studio.

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Cover Can graphic design save your life?

Illustration by Wellcome Collection for the exhibition Cancerfonden breast cancer Awareness campaign, 2016, Sweden

ARTICLE DESIGN THINKING

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Medomina advertising Produced by JR Geigy AG in 1960

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Poster for awareness about AIDS designed by Avram Finkelstein in 1987.

Advertisement for Delta-Butazolidin Geigy, 1964.

Anti-smoking printed stamps.

1995

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Children’s haemophilia colouring book Dick Bruna in 1990.

DESIGN THINKING

Advertising pamphlet for Preludin, 1962.

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Poster created for Het Nederlandse Rode Kruis Dick Bruna, 1986.

Clean Air campaign Poster against air pollution in London.

1972

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One aspect the show aims to consider is the “persuasive” strategies used in manipulating public; another one explored is the range of creative approaches to educate.

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ARTICLE DESIGN THINKING

The comprehensive showcase also tackles the use of graphics in the front-line response to epidemics, from Renaissance plague to a painted mural depicting Ebola.

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Giorgia Monostrulli

campaign: when it happens here One of the best social campaigns winner of the Lion of Cannes of 2016: Ogilvy and Mather London against female genital mutilation

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When design embraces the social it can really change the world around us and create something can move consciences and make people aware.

Ogilvy and Mather London unveils a thoughtprovoking print and outdoor campaign “It happens here� to raise awareness across the UK about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) on behalf of anti-FGM charity 28 Too Many.

Title It happens here Agency Ogilvy & Mather /London

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Client 28 Too Many Category 2016 Print & Outdoor Non-Profit-Collateral Silver 15 points Production Company Illusion Co. Ltd / Bankok Art Director Trevallyn Hall Copyrighter Laura Rogers Chief Creative Officer Gerry Human Designer Mark Osbome Travallyn Hall Illustrator Surachal Puthkulangkura Supachai U-Rairat Executive Creative Director Gerry Human

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The campaign, which will appear from April across outdoor poster sites, 85 university campus and within regional print media, features a mutilated Union Jack flag, which has then been sewn back together. The bold imagery aims to provoke people in the UK, who may believe that FGM is an issue only for people in other countries, to see it as something that affects them too.

The line ‘Female Genital Mutilation doesn’t only happen in far away places’ sits alongside the image to support the powerful visual. Six versions of the creative will run in total, which feature the Scottish, Swedish, German, Italian and Dutch flags, in addition to the Union Jack to highlight the growing problem in Europe. We are dedicated to raising awareness about sexual violence and working with members of the University of Oxford and the wider community to ensure that Oxford is a safe place for all people. Anyone can be a survivor or a perpetrator of sexual violence. People of all genders, sexual orientations, races, cultures, religions. Undergraduates, postgraduates, university staff. Anyone.

Typically carried out by a traditional circumciser using a blade, FGM is conducted from days after birth to puberty and beyond. In half the countries for which national figures are available, most girls are cut before the age of five. The practice is rooted in gender inequality, attempts to control women’s sexuality, and ideas about purity, modesty and beauty. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.

The Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation consists of a series of campaigns spread globally with the aim of fighting the phenomenon of female genital mutilation (FGM). It is the oldest international organization that focuses on the fight against female genital mutilation. It aims to link together various groups of activists present in countries where genital mutilation is still practiced on women to propagate information, communications and organizational strategies. The aim is to encourage these groups to end female genital mutilation, to ensure that this practice is completely extinguished in the countries that practice it and to provide protection to women and girls forced to leave their country for fear of being mutilated. As a member of the United Nations Global Compact, the Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation commits itself to fighting FGM by joining local activist groups and encouraging the institutions of the peoples interested in helping these groups through initiatives aimed at enhancing the role of women.

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DESIGN THINKING

Dr Ann-Marie Wilson, Executive Director of 28 Too Many said: “FGM is not just being performed in Africa, the Middle East and Asia but is taking place here, in Europe, on our very own door steps. This emotive campaign visually encompasses the concept that FGM is not an out of sight, out of mind problem but at present a risk to over 60,000 girls in the UK.” Laura Rogers, senior copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather London, added: “We are passionate about what 28 Too Many are trying to achieve and feel that the campaign highlights the abuse that is taking place here in the UK and in Europe. I urge everyone to open their eyes and minds to this campaign and support this brave organisation.”

ARTICLE

The believe is that it’s time for all of us to join together and say that sexual violence will not be tolerated in our community. That we will support survivors. That we will educate ourselves about consent. That we will create a culture free from damaging myths. That we will make here a place where change happens.

DESIGN BY RECOVERY

Can mistakes be considered as the beginning of something new?

If errors become art Marco F. Picasso Vince Frost Frost*Collective Interview

Marco F. Picasso

IF ERRORS BECOME ART A long series of typographical errors can be listed. If they are 12 you can make a calendar

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Typographical error is congenital in black art. The old printers know it very well. Today, with all the modern machines they are rarer. So the creators of Grafical, 58

ARTICLE DESIGN BY RECOVERY

a printing company, winners of the 2015 Academy of Press as “Best Technology Innovator”, thought well to exhume them and make it, in fact, the 2018 calendar.

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January is dedicated to moiré, that marbling effect that is still frequent for those who print fabrics, due to the interference of the traditional net with the weft or even the design of the fabric.

February brings us back the old good typo or even misprint and puts the brain into play with all its divisions, which often do not let the error discover, indeed, they hide it (and that obviously pops up only after delivery).

March is dedicated to the pendant (pandàn for the binders) that is when the alignment of the binding pages is not perfect and cut does not match.

What’s so better than the pandàn to create a game of optical reflections?

April the classic sheet of waste that on other occasions has already become an artistic project. By now rare, these sheets should be jealously archived and made available to the many artists who ask for them.

May is in the name of a classic that is born, often with the involuntary ‘collaboration’ of the client who, for some reason, always wants to intervene on the tests and, to satisfy him, here is the rasterization. The defect is not in the typographic tradition, but is born with the digitalization due to a problem of interpretation of the plate engraving data.

June brings us back to the old shoplifting, to the pressure that if it is not uniform can give rise to an irregular printing surface. Like the lunar surface.

September even if the holidays are over the recovery is slow and it may happen that there is an overturned binding. Just an upside down signature and all the work goes to ramengo.

October this time is the bending machine to make a tantrum or a sheet of paper for which a machine enters a folded sheet of paper. And here serious trouble begins because there is a risk of ruining the rubber.

November perhaps because of the unclean air of the industrial cities, that annoying defect of the capers appears, the dirty that can only be seen when the work is finished. But for the creatives, even these impurities inspire nothing less than a starry sky, an entire solar system, of the caper.

December to end with a flourish, it is a praise to error, here an oldfashioned mistake of the times of typography: the inverted clichè.

Images: Mistake calendars Pictures from the different calendars of 2018 made by the high-end printing company Grafigal

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DESIGN BY RECOVERY

August perhaps because of the heat and the long-awaited holidays, there are those who print inverted plates and then farewell four-color. A pineapple can become pink.

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July is a classic: the off-register with its relative crosses, which despite the automatisms still today requires, especially on rotary presses, more and more sophisticated control cameras.

Frost*Collective Interview

VINCE FROST The vision of Vince Frost, the founder and Executive Creative Director of Frost*collective in Sydney

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Failure is a precursor to learning – something designers are perhaps even more aware of than most. We wanted to find out more about Vince’s experiences in the fields of failure – and what he’s learnt from not-so-great projects as a designer.

How can designers best learn to fail and to take something from this failure?

I think designers, like most people, naturally fail. We try our hardest to get things right but inevitably we screw up trying to achieve that. I think the best way to do it is to be open to failure. You don’t think of it as failure, but just do as many things as possible. Get it out there, put it down, try lots of ideas and don’t be so critical of each idea. Let them live and breathe and keep trying again and again until you find something that feels like it’s the right thing.

What’s the most common manifestation of failure you see in designers, and how would you advise they remedy it?

I think the thing I’ve seen the most is that people become obsessed with one idea or the first idea and struggle to move on from that. I think that can be quite problematic and it means that they are not open to the idea of those ideas evolving. They become quite protective or obsessive about something, when what they need to do is think about who they are speaking to, the end game.

What is success? How do you design an outcome is not just for your portfolio?

It’s really about keeping an open mind, being positive and being open to change and other influences.

What’s been the biggest failure or mistake in your career?

I don’t see it as failure personally. I just see it as experiences that maybe haven’t gone as right as I’ve thought they should have done. There have been things that have worked against me that have been quite hard, like the experience I had in Japan with Japanese Vogue. I was there for eight months, relocated at a great cost to myself and my family, only to find out that I was really the wrong guy for the job. Even though I kept persevering and trying to make it work, it hurt so much. It hurt my head, it was the wrong culture, the wrong language, the wrong medium for me to be working in .

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Cover: Vince Frost portrait Slip it on campaign The goal is to raise people’s awareness of safety using condoms

What did you learn from it?

I loved the Japanese sense of style, sense of taste, and the respect that they have for life and individuals, like culture and crafts. I learnt respect for people who could do that role. The job of an art director for a fashion publication is a very skilled role and I don’t currently have those skills. It ended in probably the biggest career disaster I ever had, but I kind of laugh when I talk about it now because I can look back on it thinking that I did it, even though it was very unpleasant, I still learnt a lot from that experience. So in a way anything else that life throws at me I feel like I can tackle that head on.

You discuss that in working with assistants, you had to learn to trust them more in delegating work. How did you do that?

I actually learnt how to do that by accident. Until a couple of years ago I was very much still a designer – even though I had a big company and lot of people working here. I was still very hands on with all of the projects and that sometimes took me to the point of serious stretch. I think by default I had to start working with my team by delegating to them and trusting them to work on the solutions. Over time with my pulling out of that situation it helped other people grow and take responsibility.

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DESIGN BY RECOVERY

Oh yeah campaign Another way to sensitize people on ending hiv theme

In your opinion, what’s the best campaign you’ve ever made?

I guess “The Stay Safe campaign”, which is one of the three components of Ending HIV and aims at creating a dialogue with gay men that reinforces condom use as a key factor in ending the HIV epidemic. When first pitching for this project in 2012, we were very mindful of the longevity of the campaign, and the importance of it being simple and timeless – changing slightly, but always maintaining its overarching messaging and identity. We went with the equation ‘Test More + Treat Early + Stay Safe = Ending HIV’, which is exactly what the messaging is all about. This latest message is a very targeted one. Through all the research undertaken with LGBTI communities – asking about their lives, the language they respond to, what would be annoying, encouraging, hopeful – ‘undetectable’ was seen as the best catchphrase for this stage of the campaign.

It became the word we were told to latch onto as it was already in use by the community. With each campaign we try to find something short, sharp and very impactful, and having a mnemonic integrated into each of the messages has been hugely successful. There’s real strength of recognition in what we’ve created so far. Maybe recognition is boosted when it’s a social issue; maybe it resonates more. ACON was incredibly encouraging with what we created. Being a government-funded organization, it doesn’t have a huge amount of money, and so the success was around the breadth of what we could do for a lot less than what a typical advertising campaign has. We have to understand what success looks like to the target audience, and then it’s our job to achieve that.

INTERVIEW

What design project out in the world do you see to be the biggest failure?

There are lots of things out there that you think ‘well that could have been done better,’ but the fact is that it’s very easy to say that when you don’t any insight into the brief. I see the world as a designer and also a member of the general public so sometimes I can naturally see that things could have been better from my perspective to what they were, or there are things that are old that could be refreshed and someone just hasn’t tackled it. The signage right now in Sydney for the trains, ferries, busses etc. that has only recently been rolled out is something I personally would have taken quite a different approach on. For some reason in the simplification of that process the symbolism for each mode of transport was assigned a letter corresponding to its name, which is a B, a F and a T. From my perspective and a lot of people living in Sydney it’s not particularly international in its approach, and it’s quite ambiguous what these letters stand for. For non-English speakers it’s quite flawed in that respect; I would have done it very differently. But then again I don’t know what the criteria was.

It is very importat to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff - as much as stuff as possible - with as little fear as possible. It’s better to wind up with crap having tried it than to over think in the beginning and not do it. – Vince Frost

Which brands’ design has been the big- gest success?

I guess for me the brands that really stand out, are the ones that have been around for a long time without losing their integrity – great examples are Coca Cola, Apple, Fedex. These brands are all very simple and very clean visually, and also beautifully consistent in their messaging and deliverables. It’s important that brands stay modern and up to date, and continue to evolve, but without throwing away everything they’ve had in the past. Companies like Kodak, Polaroid, Tiffany’s, Nike and a whole bunch of other brands that have managed to stay relevant while times have changed by being focused on their strategy and clear on their values and quality service, they’re just serious brands

HIV campaign Vince Frost’s campaign to sensitize Australian population about the HIV epidemic

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Talking about “Design your life”. Why did you choose to publish a book, rather than release a series of blog posts or videos?

That’s a good question. The simple answer is that Penguin approached me to do a book, so that is the answer. I am actually working on it as an app, which is where we’ll expand on each chapter — we’ll release it for sale chapter by chapter in the early new year. So there are other ideas in terms of bringing Design Your Life as a brand to life. There’s other products that are part of that.

I didn’t see it as writing a book; I see it as creating a brand. But books do have a lot of power, a lot of presence and a lot of appeal to people. We’re waiting to see how it does as a book, see how the sales go.

INTERVIEW

What first struck you as a similarity between the path to a happy, successful life, and the design process?

I, like most people, became saturated with everything – work, just being a designer and being really determined to do great stuff at all costs. The time and energy, the way you’re taught to work day and night in preparation for a big presentation, is what I’ve kind of done for 25 years now. It got to the point where ‘you get a little older’ and you don’t bounce back as well, you have other issues in your life you have to deal with, and I’d always put design and helping other people first. It came at a cost. I became ill or stressed and tired. The more I put this stuff aside, the more it became worse for me. I kind of hit many walls through the course of a year, where you can just feel sick, tired and exhausted as the consequence of that neglect. Your body’s telling you to slow down and take it easy. I started to think about my- self as a project, and I needed to put myself first in terms of working at what was the problem – what is the brief?

How do I tackle these issues? Then one by one, you start to look at that thought process really as a ‘design process’. There’s a problem to be solved, you’re not being paid by anyone to do it, there’s no official deadline (unless you’ve got something quite serious happening). I went back to the problem and started to deal with it. That’s when I realised problem solving is problem solving, no matter what you apply it to.

LEARNING WITH DESIGN

Can we find a way to use design for an educational purpose?

Dyslexie font Richard Gray Neville Brody Andy Butler Playing with meanings Rebecca Fulleylove You can’t learn design online Antony Wood

Richard Gray

DYlsexIE FnoT The typeface that helps dyslexics people reading

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Christian Boer always struggled with reading.

When confronted with a page of text, the letters would twist and jumble together into a mess.

It was not until his mother overheard a conversation her husband was having with another teacher about dyslexia that she realized why her son might be having so much trouble.

“In class I would think of excuses about why I was struggling – I was tired or it just wasn’t my day,” says Boer. “But when everyone else would be finished and I had only made my way through half a page, I began to doubt myself.

You start to think, ‘am I stupid?’ “Then my mother heard this remedial teacher explaining to my dad about dyslexia and she asked her to test me”.

Boer was six when he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Despite the extra help he received at school, he still struggled with long pages of typed text. Years later, while studying art at HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, Holland, he decided to do something about his problem: he designed his own typeface.

Dyslexie is a font that aims to overcome some of the problems that people with dyslexia can have when reading. Due to the way their brains process visual information, they will often subconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters, making it harder to recognize the characters. It is thought that their brains start treating two-dimensional letters as three-dimensional objects that can be freely manipulated. When this happens, the letter “b” can look like a “d”… or a “p” or a “q”. It is easy to see why this can quickly become confusing.

“Traditionally in typeface design, there are ‘rules’ that say it is best to make the letters as uniform as possible,” says Boer, now 36. “If you make the arch of an “h” the same as an “n”, it produces a typeface that is clean and quiet for ordinary readers. For me, these letters become three dimensional so you can turn them around and they begin to look alike. What I wanted to do was to slap these 3D letters flat.” He set about finding ways that would make it easier to distinguish different letters from each other. One key change was to make the letters bottom heavy, so they are bolder at the base than at the top. “It is like fixing a brick onto a bicycle wheel,” he explains. “If you turn the wheel, the brick will always fall to the bottom. With the letters, if you turn them upside down, they look unnatural as the heavy side should be on the bottom”.

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Font declination The letters of the Dyslexie font are designed while taking the different characteristics of dyslexia into consideration

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ABCDEF ABCDEF GHIJKLM GHIJKLM NOPQRS NOPQRS A AB BC CD DE EF FG GH H TUVWXZ P PQ QR RS ST T U U V V W W A B C D TUVWXZ E LEARNING WITH DESIGN

aa bb cc ddPee Q ff gg jj RhhSii T abcdefghijklm tt uu vv w waxxbyyczzd e f

abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxz 00 11 22 33 t44 u55 v66 w 77 8 89 9 x y nopqrstuvwxz & & (( )) [[ ] ] = = + + @ @ 1234567890 0 1 2 3 4 5 1234567890 & ( ) [ ] = .,;:!?%&$@ A AB BC CD DE EF FG GH H .,;:!?%&$@ 79

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Unlike many traditional typefaces, the Dyslexie font is strongly asymmetric. Instead of keeping the letters a uniform size, some have longer “sticks” that help to make them stand out more in words. Similarly, letters that look alike, such as “v”, “w” and “y”, vary in their height when they are typed.

The shapes of the letters are also asymmetric, with the top of a “b” being narrower than the top of a “d”, making them easier to distinguish.

“These shapes are based far more on handwriting than other fonts,” says Boer.

Many dyslexic people find reading handwritten text easier than when it is typed. “There is movement in it,” explains Boer. “The way we learn to write can often determine the shape of the letters and so it might be why our brains find them easier to distinguish.” Many of the letters in Dyslexie also feature unusual serifs – the small lines added to the end of a stroke in a letter – that make them easier to distinguish. While serif fonts like Times New Roman are often hard for dyslexics to read, because the ticks at the tips on each stroke obscure the shape of the letter, Boer found adding certain serifs could help. On the letter “u”, for example, the vertical stick on the right-hand-side features a tapered flick to make it longer than the stick on the “n”.

“It makes the ‘u’ look unnatural when you put it upside down,” says Boer.

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Capital letters are also bolder than other letters to help them stand out – a tweak that Boer added to help himself deal with his own difficulties. “I often forget or miss the capital letters when I am writing, so by making them stand out more it helps me”, he explains. But after sending the font to other dyslexics he found he had to tone the tweak down. “Those with only mild dyslexia found the bold capitals difficult, so I have reduced it slightly so they don’t impair their reading but still can help those with more severe dyslexia”.

LEARNING WITH DESIGN

Initially, Boer produced the font as a project for his art degree at university. But he found there was a real demand for what he had produced, prompting him to turn it into a usable typeface that can be installed onto computers. “I had initially thought I probably use it on my own computer to help me when I left college and started working,” he said. “I had no idea there were so many people out there suffering from dyslexia.” In fact, between 10% and 20% of the population are thought to have some form of dyslexia.

It is estimated that more than 700 million children and adults worldwide are at risk of lifelong literacy and social exclusion as a result of the condition.

Research conducted at the University of Twente has shown that dyslexic readers make fewer mistakes when reading text in Boer’s font, while eye tracking experiments conducted at France’s University of Lille also have shown that the gaze of dyslexics’ children flows more easily across a page of text using the font than other more traditional fonts. Boer’s font is by no means the only typeface for people with dyslexia. Natascha Frensch, a graphic designer at the Royal College of Art, produced a font known as Read Regular in 2003 and the British Dyslexia Association also recommends using Arial, Comic Sans or Century Gothic. But Boer’s font exaggerates the asymmetry far more than these fonts to make them even easier to read. The demand for Dyslexie has been high. Since making the typeface available online in 2011, it has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, mainly by home users, but also by schools, universities and businesses.

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What it is like to have dyslexia Letter variation from the dyslexy font

by Christian Boer

Andy Butler interview

NEVILLE BRODY He directed the English magazine The Face and restyled The Guardian, The Observer, The Times

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Neville Brody is the founder of a globally creative, innovative agency specializing in digital, identity and typography. He’s internationally recognized as a pioneer in the fields of graphic design.

When you were growing up did you always want to become a graphic designer?

I feel like I was always going to be an artist or a designer – I was never going to be a train driver or a fireman. I was drawing before I could even walk, so the only decision I had to make really was whether I wanted to become a fine artist or a designer. The reason I entered into design is because I thought that fine art was fairly dishonest as an industry. It pretends to be about culture but it’s really about money. Design is much more honest about it’s commercial context and can also reach a lot more people than fine art. I have always been very interested in how advertising and design can manipulate the way that people think and in the early years I wanted to lean those tools in order to turn them around, to reveal the truth rather than conceal it. Something else worth mentioning is that when I was about seven or eight I designed a complete identity system for an imaginary postal service – which is quite sad when you think about it! The fact I wanted sit at home doing that while my friends were playing football!

Do those aspects of graphic design still interest you the most today?

The thing that excites me about graphic design is not really graphic design itself, but communication. The process of language, understanding language, encoding language. This is something that constantly needs managing because it’s always changing. As soon as anything becomes a fixed in a pattern we tend to slip into not thinking about it critically. I’ve always been trying to challenge, rethink, or disrupt through graphic design. I’ve never wanted to find a comfortable place in all of this.

How do you avoid having a formulaic approach?

Sometimes, inevitably that happens but the starting point for every project is about trying to be fresh. You never want to pursue a style but occasionally your way of thinking can be detected in the work you produce.

Which part of the design process do you enjoy the most?

I enjoy working with language and strategy. I also love to get stuck into a one-off poster or book jacket – projects where you can just get very deep into the experimentation. Today everything seems to be about design and I like that too. I know it’s not a particularly new concept but it’s more and more noticeable. You hear government, education and other aspects of society talked about as ‘a design process’ and that’s what they are, almost everything is… for example my job as dean of the RCA is a design process.

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Blur typeface (1992) This font was recently selected by the Museum of Modern art New York (MoMA) as part of its permanent collection

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Arena homme +, 2010/11 Alongside editor in chief Joann Furniss, Brody was art direction on issues 32, 33 and 34 of the biannual men’s fashion bible

The new british, 2013 Alongside editor in chief Kez Glozier, Brody is the art director on the new British

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Given all of the online resources available to train oneself as a designer, do you think that it’s still important to study design at an institution?

It’s never been necessary to go to university to become a professional designer. You train yourself by doing and understand what you can as your paid work allows you to. What you get from undertaking a bachelors or masters degree at an institution is an opportunity to experiment and develop your own language as a designer. There’s also an important social element to being among like-minded people, who are also there experimenting. It’s hard to find time to do all of that in a professional setting because you’re chasing money and surviving most of the time – you’re ruled by meetings, production times and deadlines. Design school gives you the chance to develop your thinking, to explore and to fail – something you can’t do much of in the professional realm.

So the short answer is: you don’t need to go to school in order to have a career as a designer but it can be very valuable for your development as a thinker.

What are your thoughts on the graphic design industry today and its current output?

It’s very much like the second law of general dynamics… You might have a few hundred local coffee shops in a city that all promote themselves and their products in slightly different ways, they all have their own character to a certain degree. Then you have one big, global brand like Starbucks that uses the same limited DNA for its communication all over the world. That insular model has been very effective for a long, long time because it was seen as convenient but now people seem to be fed up with this approach. Just this week I read a piece about ‘the end of the supermarket’ in the guardian. That tells you a lot about what’s going on – people are moving away from mass produced, generic experiences and going back to more intimate, personal experiences. People are starting to look for difference again rather than uniformity. In many ways the same can be said of graphic design and I think a big reason for this has been the economic downturn. For a time graphic design had lost its relevance – many designers and most students stopped experimenting and became quite comfortable simply conforming. These were competent designers, don’t get me wrong, but the work was a usually a case of style over substance, nothing was dangerous new, or provocative. Now people are taking more risks with their work again and there’s a lot of good stuff out there. And I’m fascinated by language, code, identity – human identity.

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You mentioned that designers should take more risks and help draw attention to social issues – what advice would you give to young designers who want to do this?

Well, I would never give young designers or students any specific advice with regards to politics – everyone has to find their own feet. What I really want to convey to my students is the idea that everything they do will somehow effect the society that they live in. The point I was making in that interview is that it’s more about being a conscious designer than anything else. Some designers don’t think about the consequence of their work, they are just motivated by money and making things look ‘nice’. There’s others who are only interested in designing for other designers. Designers are quite responsible figures in society so I think that it’s very important that they understand the context in which they work.

ARTICLE

How has teaching broadened your own thinking?

I’ve been at the RCA for almost four years now and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning from the experience. There’s still lots of scope to do new things in teaching and new ways that you can structure courses so that they deliver innovative thinking. There was a time when design courses were always geared towards creating precious end objects – like a book or a piece of packaging. But what we’ve managed to do now is shift the focus onto the process and thinking – to give the students valuable tools so that the end product is now their mind, their way of thinking. The outcome of what we do, is to develop skilled, dangerous minds. I don’t see the point in teaching for any other reason.

CRITIQUE SPRING 2018

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The New British alongside editor in chief kez glozier, brody is the art director on the New British, 2014

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England brody 2014 Commissioned

by NIKE, Brody associates produced two typefaces: one for naming and one for numbers, to be applied to the england squad’s world cup shirts

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Rebecca Fulleylove

playing with meanings The satirical illustrations of Stephan Schmitz

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Behind an essential and simple style, behind the use of flat, delicate and precise colors lies the whole world of Swiss artist Stephan Schmitz.

Appreciated by a large number of publishing realities, Stephan’s work focuses on meaning and concept with the aim of giving his audience an honest and sincere vision of what surrounds it.

Swiss artist based in Zurich, Stephan Schmitz studied illustration at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. Freelance illustrator, collaborates with various publishing companies: advertising, fashion, scientific magazines, in particular psychology, reaching the desired result every time.

Simple and elegant images for challenging content that touch on existential topics. He has received many awards and recognitions. In recent years his works have achieved great success on Instagram.

Essential style and conceptual cut, the illustrations by Stephan Schmitz contain many elements: the paradox, the hidden element and above all the double, the other of us. In every single image the subject is duplicated and becomes something else, representing desires, projections and contrasts Hidden faces among the clothes, shadows and reflections: each image tells a story and where there is no reflection, objects take the human form, to represent the alter ego: an iceberg, the crown of a tree, a newspaper burnt.

Few lines portray fantasies and nuances of everyday life; optical illusions underlie the contrast between dream and reality. Delicate and poetic, some images are softly surreal.

Stephan Schmitz manages to characterize his drawings with simple strokes that go straight to the heart and the brain of those who watch them: this is the strength of his artistic language, sober and substantial.

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Cover: Less is more Cover for swiss magazine NZZ Folio

ARTICLE LEARNING WITH DESIGN

Unlawful Firing for Beo Bachter magazine

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There will be loneliness Illustration for the german version

of the book “22 things a woman must know if she loves a man with Asperger’s syndrom”

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Importance of Listening Illustration for Southwest: The Magazine

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Antony Wood

YOU CAN’T LEARN DESIGN ONLINE Studying design at home can not be an alternative to formal lessons

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Today, the number of online courses, online certificate, and degree programs, and the scores of eager students, has grown exponentially in all disciplines — design included. Suddenly, instead of moving to a costly design capital like New York or London, students can learn the basics from the comfort of their own homes. With a few classes under their belts, they can build out their portfolios, start interviewing, and land a great job. The rationale is perfectly sound. But instead of other disciplines, no, you can’t learn design online. Let’s examine why.

Online education isn’t so effective First, online-only education has serious flaws. At Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), scientists surveyed online charter schools in 18 states. With this data, researchers compared the performance of students in web classes against a control group consisting of counterparts of similar backgrounds enrolled in physical classes.

The results were shocking. CREDO found that online charters were the equivalent of students receiving 72 fewer days of instruction in reading and 180 fewer days of instruction in math. The project director went so far as to state that it was as though online students did not go to school for the entire year. This isn’t a perfect analogy, as this study covered only primary education (ages 5-18). One can argue that undergraduate (and postgraduate) students are far more motivated, and thus benefit more from online classes than their primary school peers. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

Researchers at UC Davis found that compared to peers in traditional classes, Californian college students enrolled in online classes were 11 percent less likely to pass. Reasons include the ease of procrastination in online courses, as well as a lack of physical and social cues.

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Collaboration can’t be learned online For design students, the nature of their discipline is a compelling case for avoiding purely online courses. In a web-only class, it’s difficult for aspiring designers to cover the most important competencies — which will make or break them as professionals. These include the ability to work in tight-knit teams, to develop synergy and efficiency, and to balance client demands.

Take an ad agency, which is built on the two-person creative team: one copywriter, who develops the text (copy) for the ads, and an art director, who creates visuals.

The best teams have a unique relationship: a mind-meld, an alignment that allows copy and visuals to build off each other and present a unified, insightful message. I’ve certainly been in situations where each task was compartmentalized. The client brought an idea to me, I developed visuals, then sent my “design” to a copy editor to collect some words. Or, I was given the words and asked for an image. It’s possible to create a deliverable this way. But the final product won’t win design awards or lodge into the psyches of its intended audience.

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In fact, my most successful campaigns have involved countless hours of teamwork between clients, copywriters, account managers, creative directors, social media strategists, and creative strategists. It’s impossible to cultivate this collaborative dynamic solely from an internet class.

These soft skills, which include active listening, persuasion, and conflict resolution abilities, can be learned. One NCBI survey shows that participants can improve interpersonal abilities by at least 25 percent.

The key, however, is that soft skills aren’t improved online. Every soft skill depends on social cues (such as tone or facial expression) or clear, explicit communication.Counterintuitively, remote companies require even stronger soft skills than regular workplaces. Online work environments can suffer from misunderstandings because there are fewer clues to work with.

For this reason, even the most successful remote organizations use a host of technologies to compensate, such as Slack or Zoom. In short: if you haven’t learned to work with a collaborator (a copywriter, creative director, strategist) in a physical setting, how can you expect to learn that on the fly?

LEARNING WITH DESIGN

Beginner beware Further, many web design classes assume pre-existing knowledge.

Most of these courses are assignment-based: students receive a task and reference materials, create their designs, submit for critique, and repeat.

Feedback comes from office hours or peer review on video chats or online forums. In many ways, these courses simply seem like the internet version of an in-person education.

But they’re not. Project-based learning is ideal for anyone who already has a background in design (a few semesters of introductory courses or even a degree), but is far from intuitive for everyone else. Skimming Skillshare’s website, one can’t find a unified curriculum, which helps beginning students build a solid design foundation and foster a sense of taste, two key skills critical to any professional designer. Though many of the courses are thematically similar, without coherent units, a newcomer can be overwhelmed by sheer choice.

The internet is a splendid thing, softening the tyrannies of distance with fiber optic cable. While its benefits are undeniable, an online-only design education is not the bargain it seems to be. Unless you need to plug holes in your existing skillset or have limited aims, relying on internet classes to become a full-fledged designer is not feasible. You’ll end up with a shoddy design foundation that won’t prepare you for the demands of a real-world, agency environment.

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Cover: Illustration

by Malika Favre

UTOPIA AND DESIGN

Will evolution of technologies improve the world?

The making of typographic human Ellen Lupton Difference between web aspects Susanna Marsiglia & Laura Zanati AI and the future of design Rob Girling Font Braille Neue Mark Wilson

Ellen Lupton

The making of typographic HUMAN How typography and humans reinvented themselves in the era of Guthenber galaxy

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Typography is far more than type design and layout. It touches on key values of our society: the printed free word, and the democratic discourse. It is thanks to the power of typography that this discourse has assumed the form of a game of argument and counter-argument.

The new-media technology calls into question our accepted notion of typographic communication. Not since Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century has typographic communication undergone such a fundamental change as today. The typographic trade finds itself at a crossroads. Can typography still play a significant role when digitization and new media are shaking the foundations of the typographic craft? What direction will it take in its further development?

Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962. No easy read, this rather technical book overflows with opaque excerpts from seventeenth-century poetry and bulk quotes from pioneering scholarship about print’s impact on the modern mind—readers today are advised to approach this book with a double shot of espresso.

Despite its density, The Gutenberg Galaxy helped trigger McLuhan’s own remaking from a Canadian English professor into a global intellectual celebrity. The book uses typography in a remarkably aggressive way, breaking up its soporific pages of academic prose with slogan-esque “glosses” set in 18-point Bodoni Bold Italic. Bam! McLuhan was using type to invent the McLuhanism. Five years later, he produced the radical mass paperback The Medium Is the Massage with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, amplifying his early visual experiments to new levels of bombast.

Who is McLuhan’s Typographic Man? The concept of the human individual (an isolated self walled off from the collective urges of society) was born in the Renaissance and became the defining subject of modern systems of government, law, economics, religion, and more. This individual was, McLuhan argued, both product and producer of the most influential technology in the history of the modern West: typography. The use of uniform, repeatable texts transformed the way people think, write, and talk and triggered the rise of a money-based economy and the Industrial Revolution. The vast enterprise of modernity all came down to letters printed on sheets of paper. Movable type engendered the system of mass production.

This new way of making things broke down a continuous process into a series of separate operations. The printed book became the world’s first commodity.

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What happened to Typographic Man, and what is he doing today? The eyeball was this creature’s supreme sense organ, supplanting shared auditory experiences of preliterate society. McLuhan predicted that in the rising electronic age, the individualism of Typographic Man would succumb to the tribal chorus of the “global village,” whose collective existence was defined by radio and television (dominated by sound) rather than by private acts of reading (dominated by sight).

Custom lettering is a powerful current in contemporary design. Type design has arrived surprisingly late to written communication’s biggest event since the Renaissance. The Typographic Man was born in 1450 and fattened up in the candy shops of commercial printing. Alas, during the opening decades of the World Wide Web, his diet was drastically reduced to the half-dozen fonts typically installed on end users’ own computer systems. This situation has finally begun to change, as members of the type design and web communities have agreed on ways to deploy diverse typefaces online without exposing them to shameless piracy. Services such as Type Kit, which legally host fonts and serve them to specific sites, have become big players in the omnivorous expansion of web typography.

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Typography involves the use of repeatable, standardized letterforms (known as fonts), while lettering consists of custom alphabets, usually employed for headlines, logotypes, and posters rather than for running text. During the first hundred years of printing, calligraphy and type fluidly interacted, not yet seen as opposing enterprises. While it is well-known that Gutenberg and other early printers used manuscripts as models for typefaces, it is more surprising to learn that the scribes who were employed in the “scriptoriums” or writing factories of the day often produced handmade copies of printed books for their luxury clientele, using calligraphy to replicate print. Today, a vital collision between idioms of handwriting and mechanical and post-mechanical processes is shaping our typographic vocabulary. As the procedures of typesetting and layout merged, designers became direct consumers of fonts, no longer separated by layers of mediation from the essential raw material of their craft. In this intoxicating new era of instant alphabetic gratification, designers could not only buy, borrow, and steal digital fonts but could crack them open, violating the original designs to create alternate characters and even whole new typefaces.

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It hasn’t really worked out that way. Today, our lives contain more typography than ever, served up via text messaging, e-mail, and internet. Letters swarm across the surface of TV commercials and cable news shows, while global villagers in the developing world have discovered SMS as an indispensable business tool.

Meanwhile, the collective experiences forged by Twitter and Facebook rely largely on the transmission of text.

The most famous McLuhanism of all, “The medium is the message,” fared no better. In today’s world, the medium is often just the medium, as content seeks to migrate freely across platforms rather than embody the qualities of a specific medium. “Device independence” has become a goal more urgent than the task of crafting unique page layouts.

The evolution of modern typography is not, of course, all about novelty and spectacle. Countering the restless appetite for sugarcoated change is a parallel hunger for anonymous, recessive purity. Gill Sans, Futura, and Helvetica—standards from the twentieth-century playlist—once laid claim to a cool neutrality suited to international communication in the machine age and beyond. While these classic faces have endured the shifting storms of taste and fashion, designers have sought out ever more subtle shades of basic black. Laurenz Brunner’s Akkurat (2004) has been heralded as “the new Helvetica,” while Aurèle Sack’s LL Brown (2011) recalls Edward Johnston’s lettering for the London Underground. Paying soft-deal homage to Futura, Radim Pesko’s Fugue (2010) flaunts a tentative bravado, like a teenager on a motorcycle. Fugue, writes Pesko, “was conceived as an appreciation of and going-back-to-the-future-and-back-again with Paul Renner.”

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Rounded end-strokes are another common craving among contemporary designers. Soft terminals restore a dash of humanity to the hard-edged realism of sans-serif typography. Eric Olson has led the way with his widely used Bryant and his more recent Anchor, a condensed gothic whose plump, sausage-like forms fit comfortably in narrow spaces. The rounded terminals of Jeremy Mickel’s Router flare out slightly, recalling the mechanical process employed to manufacture routed plastic signs.

Exploring the freshly cleared frontier of web typography, Christopher Clark is inventing surprising uses for SVG (vector graphics for the Web), HTML5 Canvas, and other emerging tools and protocols. Clark’s site not only showcases these startling prototypes but also provides instructive commentary and free code. At once generous and estranged, Clarke’s “lonely guy” persona speaks to the Typographic Man of our time, whose openhearted desire to share and connect undercuts his self-mocking alienation.

Where is Typographic Man headed as he rides off with his serifs and spurs into the digitally remastered sunset? He may always keep slipping partly backwards, looking for glimmers of black gold in the post-industrial ghost towns and open mine shafts of history. Like the modern individual McLuhan so poignantly described, today’s Typographic Man is an inward-looking loner, wrapped inside a personal cocoon of digital feeds. Yet Typographic Man has spun that protective, narcissistic cocoon from the flux of public life. Today’s individual is the product of his own voracious immersion in the common watering hole of image/music/text; he is equipped as never before to bend typography with his own means to his own ends.

This self-involved creature is connecting to the social world in new ways.

McLuhan described typography as an essential medium of exchange in the modern age: “Typography is not only a technology but is itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratio but also patterns of communal interdependence.”

As the first industrial commodity, printed book was portable, repeatable, and uniform. Unfurling today across the networked horizon, text is now mutable, interactive, and iterative, no longer melded to a solid medium. Yet as a means of exchange that ebbs and flows through communities, text remains more than ever an essential “natural resource” that offers access to participation in a world economy and a shared public life.

Images: Typographic artworks for Method

by Art director Carlo Cadenas

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Susanna Marsiglia & Laura Zanati

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WEB ASpects Knowing the meaning of emerging professions to achieve full awareness

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“Today we are experiencing a dynamic whereby all product types are turning to digital and not only interfaces will be hybrid, but entire systems”.

What is web design?

The issue is more complicated than expected: many companies, especially in Italy and Ticino, not only don’t have a clear distinction between the macro sectors of design yet, but in some cases they don’t even know the difference between a web designer and a web developer. This generates an unspeakable confusion in the moment when appear job ads that are looking for a “web designer with knowledge of PHP” or an “expert web developer of Photoshop”.

This is why those who approach the study of web design are inevitably confused by such a heterogeneity of requirements, and inevitably thinks that UX design, UI design, web design and web development are fundamentally different aspects of the same task.

Although in the world of the (almost) 3.0 web it’s essential to be flexible, it’s important to understand first of all what web design is not before venturing into the knowledge of its areas.

Web design is focused on the aesthetics of a website. A web designer is a creative, almost always expert in graphics and with a particular taste for the combination of colors, shapes and typography. It mainly uses the right brain hemisphere, associated with creativity, intuition and imagination.

On the other hand, the web developer takes care of “transforming” into code what the web designer creates, integrating all the infrastructures that allow a web page to work and interact correctly with the user.

It is not at all rare that today many web developers are also involved in web design, and vice versa. Having a knowledge of both disciplines helps to better organize their work and satisfy all customer needs with greater awareness.

Even though until a few years ago designers limited themselves to creating aesthetically appealing interfaces without going into the merits of their usability, with the advent of web 2.0 web design was subjected to a significant evolution, contributing to the birth of two other branches of very underrated first trade: UI design and UX design.

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Images: Yasa.com All the Illustrations in this article are made

by Elaheh Zahedi for an attorney website

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What is UX design?

UX design stands for User Experience design (also abbreviated as UXD) and is made up of a set of processes aimed at increasing user satisfaction by improving the usability of a web page, its ease of use, the intuitiveness and interaction. The term was coined in the late ‘90s by Don Norman, co-founder of the Norman Group Design Consultancy, which at the time declared: “The “user experience” encompasses all aspects of the interaction between the end user and the company, its services and products”.

This implies the fact that, beyond the means used, UX design includes any type of interaction between a customer (active or potential) and the company that provides a given service or product. It is a real scientific process applicable to any field, not just to the design of websites, even though over the years it has become almost exclusively a peculiarity of the digital world.

What is UI design?

The UI design (acronym of User Interface design) is a subset of the UX design, its “visual soul”. And it’s also the most easily misunderstood task and subject to free interpretation by companies in job advertisements. While the User Experience is an agglomeration of actions focused on optimizing a product, the UI design deals purely with the presentation of the product itself (or the brand, the service, the company), which for some companies implies a mandatory knowledge of brand design and/or front end development, while for others it’s sufficient to be graphic design experts.

Neither of the two schools of thought is more or less correct than the other: they are in the same discipline.

The UI designer is in fact responsible for everything related to the visual and interactive part of a web product, first of all the interface that presents itself to the user and which represents the very first impact with the brand.

The ultimate aim is to guide the user inside the page, indicating clearly and precisely where he can find what he is looking for exclusively through the interface. While the UX designer does not necessarily need to know the code, the UI designer is increasingly asked to approach web programming in order to build a better interactivity with the user. The UI designer is also focused on storytelling as an integral part of the presentation of a brand, and often creates a style guide containing all the crucial aspects of the brand identity (use of the logo, fonts, graphic aids for social media...) that are important for standardize and make communication consistent.

He is entrusted with the task of finding the best way to convey corporate values, mission and vision through visual communication.

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The UX designer is a multitasking figure who moves between design, marketing and project management and has basic knowledge of sociology, psychology and cognitive science. Provides clear and precise directions to other departments, to ensure that the final product is as close as possible to the customer’s ultimate needs.

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The ultimate goal is always to improve the user experience, providing him with exactly what he wants, without too many frills or complications. A good result is achieved not only through the right combination of shapes and colors, but also through appealing content, well-positioned call to action, fluidity of navigation and ease of understanding processes.

Rob Girling

AI and the future OF DESIGN Designers well provide the missing link between AI and humanity

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For anyone doubting that AI is here, the New York Times recently reported that Carnegie Mellon University plans to create a research center that focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Harvard Business Review started laying the foundation for what it means for management, and CNBC started analyzing promising AI stocks.

I made the relatively optimistic case that design in the short term is safe from AI because good design demands creative and social intelligence.

Today, most design jobs are defined by creative and social intelligence.

These skill sets require empathy, problem framing, creative problem solving, negotiation, and persuasion. The first impact of AI will be that more and more non-designers develop their creativity and social intelligence skills to bolster their employability.

The implication for designers is that more than just the traditional creative occupations will be trained to use “design thinking” techniques to do their work. Designers will no longer hold a monopoly (if that were ever true) on being the most “creative” people in the room. You can imagine a classroom, where an instructor trained in design thinking is constantly testing new interaction frameworks to improve learning. Or a designer/ hospital administrator who is tasked with rethinking the inpatient experience to optimize it for efficency, ease of use, and better health outcomes. We’re already seeing this trend emerge—the Seattle mayor’s office has created an innovation team to find solutions to Seattle’s most immediate issues and concerns. The team embraces human-centered design as a philosophy, and includes designers and design strategists. Stanford’s d.school has been developing the creative intelligence of non-traditionally trained designers for over a decade. New programs like MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program are also emerging. Even medical schools are starting to train future physicians in design thinking. This speaks to design’s broader relevance, but also to a new opportunity for educators across disciplines to include intelligence training and human-centered design in their curricula.

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I already wrote about how tools like Autodesk Dreamcatcher use algorithmic techniques to provide designers with a more abstracted interface for creation. Given sufficient high-level direction, constraints, goals, and a problem to solve, these tools can spit out hundreds of variations of a design, leaving designers to pick their favorites or keep re-mixing them until they get closer to a great design. The implications of this vary across design disciplines. In architecture, the parametric movement dubbed Parametricism 2.0 demonstrates the potential of technologically enhanced creativity.

Its implications are already being explored in the gaming industry, as we design virtual environments and large virtual cities. Generative design techniques aren’t especially new, but deep reinforcement learning is a relatively new technique that emerged in the last three to four years and is responsible for much of the recent excitement and progress of AI as a discipline. Google’s DeepMind created an artificial intelligence program called Deep Q, which uses deep reinforcement learning to play Atari games and improve itself over time, eventually acquiring amazing skills like discovering unknown loopholes in the games. The real breakthrough with DeepMind’s Deep Q, and its successor AlphaGo—the computer program that plays the board game Go—is that the AI doesn’t have any domain knowledge or expertise in game play. And it doesn’t even need someone to codify the rules of how to play. To that extent, games are a test environment for artificial intelligence to learn.But what about design? That’s where the curator role comes in. In the future, designers will train their AI tools to solve design problems by creating models based on their preferences.

ARTICLE UTOPIA AND DESIGN

A cynic might say that, as a massive number of people lose their jobs to AI-powered automation, they would escape in a virtual reality world, powering a growing demand for virtual worlds, objects, and experiences.

Hopefully, we can avoid this dystopian scenario, but as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality explodes, it will become the next frontier of opportunity for design. By framing the argument to show how AI is stealing our design jobs, I’ve perhaps done a disservice to AI’s contributions to the design profession. When humans and computers work together, they can do amazing things that neither could do alone—just take a look at Michael Hansmeyer’s unimaginable shapes. With their millions of facets, these forms cannot be built by a human alone, yet they can redefine architecture. While this is just one example, there is something undeniably appealing about finding ways to amplify our creativity as individuals and across professions. I can see the potential for a future where our personal AI assistants, armed with a deep understanding of our influences, heroes, and inspirations, constantly critique our work, suggesting ideas and areas of improvement.

Challenges like how we interact with each other in virtual reality and how we create and communicate shared experiences are not only unique for this new medium, but require skills such as creative and social intelligence that are hard to outsource to AI. In addition, virtual worlds may generate new demand for the more traditional design disciplines, such as architecture, interior design, object design, and fashion, as we rush to create virtual worlds.

Cover: Artificial Intelligence Illustration created

by Goran Factory for the book “Artificial Intelligence”

by Kevin Warwick

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Mark Wilson

BRAILLE NEUE FONT Braille you can touch, letters you can see

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To any sighted person, braille looks like a language masked in encrypted code. It’s incredible, but totally indecipherable. As a result, braille is a companion to our visual language–an add-on for some situations, not a standard that the 285 million visually impaired people around the world can reliably expect to find next to any and all visual text.

To any sighted person, braille looks like a language masked in encrypted code. It’s incredible, but totally indecipherable. As a result, braille is a companion to our visual language–an add-on for some situations, not a standard that the 285 million visually impaired people around the world can reliably expect to find next to any and all visual text.

Japanese designer Kosuke Takahashi wondered if braille might be something that sighted people could learn to read with their eyes rather than their hands. “It all started from simple question, ‘How can I read braille?’

‘Does it become a character if I connect the dots?’” Takahashi recounts. “Even though it is the same letter, it felt incongruous that sighted people could not read it”. Of course, while we sometimes combine braille and print graphics– just by placing the dots over or under text–we largely don’t stack the two because we have no simple way to do so. Braille was designed with letters and numbers that have no 1:1 correlation with the shapes of our glyphs.

Take the number two and the number three in braille. The number two is two dots, stacked vertically. The number three is two dots, sitting side-by-side.

Neither looks like a “2” or “3” in any way.

Takahashi’s question led to several design experiments which culminated in Braille Neue. It’s a typeface that’s totally legible to anyone with sight, but its skeleton is based upon the bumps of braille. As a result, it can be seen with your eyes or your hands. It’s a font for anyone. To design the typeface, Takahashi began with the braille grid itself. He tried drawing Japanese characters by connecting the dots, but since he couldn’t move the braille dots, lest he destroy the legibility of braille, he had to be more creative with his letterforms themselves. “The lines were all messed up and had terrible shapes”, he says. The arrangement simply seemed incompatible with the complicated letter shapes. So he retreated, falling back to the more simplified Latin alphabet to prove the concept.

The results speak for themselves, and Takahashi imagines that Braille Neue could usher in a more inclusive era for wayfinding and other graphics in public spaces. He hopes to implement Braille Neue somewhere at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Of course, Takahashi admits he’s not the first to combine visual letters and braille. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the use of braille itself is actually on the downturn.

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Braille Neue Example of Braille Neue font: the outline version can be osed for both the Latin alphabet and the Japanese one

ARTICLE UTOPIA AND DESIGN

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The problem is that while society actually supports the implementation of braille on products and in public spaces pretty well, we’re not subsidizing programs to teach it.

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A typeface like Braille Neue only solves part of the accessibility problem. But if all of us noticed braille staring us right in the face, we’d sooner recognize its societal value.

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Can design and environment work together?

Design takes on human survival Laura Drouet & Olivier Lacrouts Popsicles of polluted water Elle Hunt

Laura Drouet & Olivier Lacrouts

Design Takes on Human Survival Paola Antonelli introduces Broken Nature, the main theme of XXII Triennale of Milano

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Announced in November 2017, the theme of the upcoming XXII Triennale di Milano, “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”, proposes to “make visible the thread of violence that connects matters of the environment to politics, social justice, and economy”, and to “unearth design’s potential to offer alternative insight into global matters”.

According to the curator: “In contemporary design, ethics and aesthetics can coexist and prosper. Broken Nature will propose examples of design at all levels whose moral depth does not involve aesthetic and sensual mortification. The exhibition will bring together pre-existing examples and new proposals. It will investigate both already tested and new strategies, and will explore areas and instruments of potential intervention. It will identify fundamental philosophical questions - ontological, epistemological and ethical - that must be highlighted in relation to these new strategies for human survival.” Because such a global issue needs a global awareness, the curatorial team developed a web platform with the aim of reaching as many souls as possible, and “to be truly transparent”. Launched on March 1st, not only is this platform thought as an anticipation to the next edition of the Triennale – which will start in March 2019 – but it also proposes an interdisciplinary and multimedia “living index” that shall be enriched in the upcoming months with relevant contents - from academic papers to articles to newspaper article and scientific discoveries.

Described by Thomas P. Campbell – director of the Met museum in New York – as the “fourth space” of the museum, the internet has gradually become inherent to cultural institutions and to the diffusion of art and design. In this quest for digital visibility, Broken Nature’s web platform could well become a powerful and flagship tool to encourage the cross-disciplinary dialogue and bring design at the heart of the environmental debate.

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Cover: Picture of Alaska’s Susitna Glacier Nasa Close-up of the ice island from the Petermann glacier Nasa

Elle Hunt

Popsicles of POLLUTED WATER Students from New Taipei City collected samples from urban rivers, creeks and ports

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Three design students from the National Taiwan University of Arts, in New Taipei City, have drawn international attention to water contamination for their graduation project: Polluted Water Popsicles.

Hung Yi-Chen, Guo Yi-hui and Cheng Yu-Ti – in their fourth and final year of a visual communications qualification – sourced water from 100 different lakes, rivers, beaches and ports in Taiwan, and turned it into a range of colorful, contaminated ice blocks. The samples were first frozen in moulds then preserved in polyester resin for display. Plastic pollution is clearly visible in these popsicles made of water taken from the Tamsui river, which flows through Taipei. In her inaugural address in May last year, President Tsai Ingwen said her administration would ‘strictly monitor and control all sources of pollution’: ‘After all, we only have one Earth, and we only have one Taiwan,’ she said. The 100 samples were ranked from dirtiest to cleanest, with the China Post reporting that the most polluted was made with water from Keelung, a major port city known for its rain.

The Port of Keelung TIPC’s 2015 environmental report found more than 140 discharge outlets in the port area, with domestic and urban wastewater contributing to pollution caused by ships and rubbish. Long-term water quality monitoring began in 2014. Water samples taken from Taitung and elsewhere in the east of the island were found to be much cleaner.

Hung Yi-Chen told the LA Times that the goal of the polluted popsicles project was to call attention to the issue of water pollution (in this case, of the Wayao ditch) in a novel way: ‘We hope when more people see this they can change their lifestyles’.

The team also designed colourful wrappers for each one, labelling their source. ‘We hoped to use the contrast and conflict between the pretty popsicle wrapper and the polluted water inside to let society understand the importance of clean water resources,’ Guo Yi-hui told the China Post.

The full set of 100 are being exhibited at several sites in Taiwan, including the Taipei World Trade Centre’s Young Designers Exhibition 2017.

The project was also nominated for the Young Pin Design Award.

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Cover: Packaging of popsicles The team also designed colourful wrappers for each one Popsicles of pollution Ice lollies highlight Taiwan’s contaminated waterways

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Milano Studio Tour Monica Moramarco Books in brief Giorgia Monostrulli Events guide Andrea Giubbolini

ATTO

STUDIO 02

OFFICE MILANO

STUDIO LABO

STUDIO DISPARI

WRONG

VENTIZERONOVE

PITIS E ASSOCIATI

Monica Moramarco

MILANO STUDIO TOUR

UAU STUDIO

A practical guide to the best graphic design studios in the city of Milan

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The graphics, to be understood as a design discipline of communication, has had in the process of affirmation of the economic-entrepreneurial phenomenon that has been defined with the expression ‘made in Italy’ a fundamental role. Since the mid-fifties of the twentieth century, graphics has played a significant role in the construction and dissemination of this ‘image’. It is the graphics that shaped and made visible a symbolic universe through which consumers met the contents. Italian graphic has always meant as a synonymous of style.

Style is primarily a distinctive notion, an ability to relate, a communicative attitude of the product and the object. And before owning the chair or the armchair, the sofa or the home with modern lines and innovative materials, consumers have known their images, their names and their quality from the pages of advertisements, promotional brochures, catalogs, video adv and from magazines. But graphic design is not simple a way to sell better stuffs. With graphic design is possible to change the world and build a new awareness among people, it is possible to influence the public and operate to combat the most pressing social problems. Milan is one of the most important cities in the world communication design and graphics, and here it is possible to read an overview of the best studies of this innovative and always growing city.

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WRONG Year founded 2010 Principals Isabella Conticello, Giacomo Costa and Federico Mauro

VENTIZERONOVE Year founded 2009

Type design Corporate identity, editorial, packaging, illustration, print, web

Top clients Rochebobois, Nurant mag, Tekhne, Trabattoni, Favini, Casa International, BACS design, Alienina, IED, Porro, Simmel, Città del Sole, Poltrona Frau, Cassina, Ferrarelle, San Pellegrino, Moleskine Social Profiles Facebook: VENTIZERONOVE Twitter: VZNstudio Behance: VZNstudio Instagram: ventizeronovemilano

Year founded 2003 Principals Paolo Casati and Cristian Confalonieri

Philosophy Graphics, video and photography are our services to offer to demanding clients, with contemporary objectives that last over time. The project of the logo, of the video or photo shoot aims to develop unique solutions able to give voice to the needs of individual users and the masses and establish direct communication with the user.

Type design Communication, web design, editorial, brand identity, concept design, mobile app design, territorial marketing, events, video, social media strategy

Top clients Mazzoleni, Fiorio, Kappa, Barbara Cesale, Stramilano, Gruppo Canepa, Oliviero Toscani, Amuri, Paolo Ventura, Sandro Gaeta, Geomag

Top clients Accenture, Acer, Adidas, Airbnb, Alce nero, Piero Castiglioni, Regione Lombardia, Asus, BMW, Casio, Diesel, Fiat, HomeAway, IED, L’Oréal, Leffe, Lexus, Martini, MaxMara, Mediaset Premium, Mondadori, Nokia, Nastro Azzurro, Politecnico di Milano, RCS, Samsung, Sanofi aventis, Telecom, TIM, Vodafone, Wind, UniCredit

Social Profiles Facebook: Wrong Studio Behance: Wrong Studio YouTube: Wrong Studio

Contact info phone: +39 0256569540 mail: info@vznstudio.com

Contact info phone: +39 349 516 1922 mail: hello@wrongstudio.com isabella@wrongstudio.com giacomo@wrongstudio.com federico@wrongstudio.com

Location Arcole Square, 4

Location Santa Croce Street, 2

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Philosophy We are a team of professionals, who collaborate on projects, exchange ideas and grow together.

Social Profiles Facebook: Studiolabo Instagram: studiolabomilano Contact info phone: +39 02 36.63.81.50 mail: info@studiolabo.it Location Palermo Street, 1

STUDIO TOUR

Philosophy Our projects combine the rigor of Italian graphic tradition together with common life experiences with the inputs given by our travels in the far East and its spicy cuisine.

STUDIOLABO

GUIDE

Principals Sonia Mion and Nicola Iannibello

Type design Branding, corporate, art direction, advertising, editorial, illustration, infographic, logo, type, icon, packaging, web, social, spot, videoclip, backstage, aftermovie, photography

ATTO UAU STUDIO

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Year founded 2008 Principals Sara Villa and Cesare Martino Type design Visual communication, digital (web design, advertising, ux interfaces), editorial Philosophy We are a team of communication professionals with over 15 years of experience. On the basis of the project to be implemented, the most suitable figures are identified among graphic designers, web designers, copywriters and social media managers.

Top clients Architettura Polimi, Mondadori Comics, NRGlex, Dar Darma, Citral, Scaringi Pasticcerie, AIGO, GRU Architetti, Keypa Social Profiles Facebook: UAU Studio Twitter: UAU Studio LinkedIn: UAU Studio Pinterest: UAU Studio

Year founded 2013 Principals Sara Bianchi and Andrea Zambardi Type design Brand identity, editorial, illustration, motion graphics and web design Philosophy Atto works on a wide range of projects, carefully curating every detail and guiding our clients through each step of the process. Atto believes in the value of teaching. We collaborate with schools in the education of young designers and we develop workshops for children.

Top clients Avant Garde, Studio wok, Fondazione Furla, h/e, DÊco D’Antan, Wishtagger, TUUUM, Uovokids, Emergency, Claude, Gonzo Caravan Social Profiles Behance: Atto Dribbble: Atto Vimeo: Atto Facebook: Atto Instagram: helloatto

Contact info graphic area phone: +39 02 47950805 web area phone: +39 02 47950806 mail: info@uaustudio.com fax: +39 02 42108440

Contact info Sara Bianchi mobile: +39 349 127 7079 Andrea Zambardi mobile: +39 340 534 0251 mail: hello@atto.si sara@atto.si andrea@atto.si

Location della Majella Street, 4/A

Location Raffaele Parravicini Street, 16

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OFFICEMILANO Year founded 2018 Principals Matteo Carrubba and Angela Tomasoni Type design Web design, 3D rendering, advertising, branding, catalogue, graphic design, infographic, packaging, photography, print, product, video Philosophy Our work seeks to discover the intangible essence of a brand and to express it with unique visual solutions. In this way, we give value and identity to brands. We work with a wide range of customers, from startups to the most recognizable brands in the world, always maintaining the highest level of execution and production through print, packaging, and digital media.

Top clients Lineapelle, Hi art, Studio DDI, Silvano Sassetti, Valstar, Ratti, Smittel, Bonaudo, Adriano Meneghetti, Milano Design Weekend, Linea Architettura, Rizzoli, Ogami, Almar, Contact info phone: +39 02 36560249 Location Gaspare Aselli Street, 11

STUDIO02

PITIS E ASSOCIATI

Year founded 2001

Year founded 2007

Principals Rolando Cominelli and Francesca Zanier

Principal Massimo Pitis

Type design Product design, interior design, retail design and in-store communication, exhibit and event design, brand identity, graphics, web design, packaging design

Type design Brand identity, Editorials, Packaging, Advertising, Book design, Merchandising, Exhibition design, Web design and Interaction design

Philosophy STUDIO02 is a multi-disciplinary design consultancy offering services in various areas of design and communication.

Our wide range of expertise is today for our Clients an appreciated opportunity to “build” or “develop” their projects, products and brands “360 °”.

Philosophy Whatever the job at hand is, at Pitis we always base our work on one key step.

We listen to our clients. We want to understand their needs thoroughly so that we can come up with efficient design solutions that surpass expectations and that can represent brand’s values, vision and mission perfectly.

Year founded 2013

Type design Communication, web, editorial, research, ux and ui design, web marketing, social media, web content and website development, app development, catalogue Philosophy With our ideas and our work, we allow customers to do well and give work to a team. There is nothing certain: it is a continuous invention, an alchemy of trust, creativity, strategy, game of squares, energy, curiosity, madness.

Top clients Sem, Red Bull, Run4Me, Milano Marathon, Dubai Tour, Centauria, Vespa, Antonio Cannavacciuolo

Social Profiles Facebook: Studio02 Instagram: studio02design

Social Profiles Facebook: Pitis Instagram: pitiseassociati

Contact info phone: +39 02 97 370 390 mail: info@studio02.it

Contact info phone: +39 02 83425404 mail: studio@pitis.eu

Contact info phone: +39 02 49 537 350 mail: hello@studiodispari.com

Location G. B. Bertini Street, 19

Location Zumbini Street, 29

Location Fratelli Ruffini Street, 1

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Social Profiles Facebook: Studio Dispari

STUDIO TOUR

Top clients Wired Italia, Museo del Novecento, Armani Silos, Metrica, B&B Italia, Stories of Italy, Triennale di Milano

Principals Rossella Martinello, Gianluca Dalla Zeta, Giuseppe Di Tria, Andrea Volta

GUIDE

Top clients Brioschi, Dfine Design, Fiorucci, Politecnico di Milano, Bonetti, OBI, Ardes, Citroen Italia, LG Group, SONY, Cicoria, Edim, Geberit

STUDIO DISPARI

Giorgia Monostrulli

BOOKS IN BRIEF In this form we like to suggest books about design and communication every designer should read

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Critica portatile al visual design

How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World

Da Guthenberg ai social network

By Riccardo Falcinelli, 2014, Design, Giulio Einaudi pub. 328 pages, Italian, 17.00€, softcover

By Michael Bierut, 2015, Design, Harper Design pub. 320 pages, English, 24.85€ hardcover

A kind of personal portfolio of graphic design When I first learned of this book, I knew I had to pre-order it. Michael Beirut is one of the most exciting designers of the past few decades. His engaging and approachable personality easily becomes visible in his work.

Every chapter is wonderfully written and lushly illustrated with his process and the final solution.

GUIDE

Best critic book I am at a third of the reading. I face it with tranquility, but I can tell you that there is so much to understand, not everything is taken for granted here. I would recommend the approach with a bit of culture behind...

This book opens the mind on some issues, many of which already aware of an architect, graphic and so on.

I would recommend the purchase in order to appreciate its goodness.

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Da cosa nasce cosa

The Aiga guide to careers in graphic communication design

By Bruno Munari, 1998, Design, Laterza pub. 385 pages, Italian, 11.90€, softcover

From creative idea to solution The book is written in a large format and with a layered layout that helps a relaxed reading. The author helps in a practical way through numerous examples to understand how to find a solution for anything, presenting not the final project but the transition from the birth of the idea to its implementation and transformation into a concrete solution.

By Juliette Cezzar, 2017, Design, Bloomsbury Academic pub. English, 224 pages, 25.00€, hardcover

The best, not a catch all handbook Read this book if you are practicing, studying, loving graphic design. Not only you will keep your soul intact, you will indeed expand it. It’s a classic which could not be read if you are a graphic designer.

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Change by design

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers

Exploring design The book is great for exploring the discipline of design thinking and even greater when it has applied it to so many cases of innovation in the context of “change”.

Tim has expansive experience in the field, but in the book I found Tim wondering around aimlessly and that sometimes confused me, and many times made my journey of this read difficult.

ByJosef Muller-Brockmann, Niggli; Bilingual edition, 1996, English, 176 pages, 41.70€, hardcover

Fantastic for any skill level.

As an interaction designer for a major tech company, I am always looking to learn new things. This book is filled with diagrams, pictures, and everything you need to know about designing for the grid. Be forewarned however, half the book is in German and half is in English so really it’is half as big as it looks.

CRITIQUE SPRING 2018

AWARENESS

By Tim Brown, 2009, Design, Harper Business pub.

272 pages, English, 11.90€ softcover

Graphic Design Visionaries

Thoughts on Design

By Caroline Roberts, Laurence King Publishing 2015, 312 pages, English, 37.50€, paperback

By Paul Rand, Michael Bierut, 2014 Chronicle Books Reissue edition, 96 Pages, English, 19.90€, paperback

An easy resource covering distinctive accomplishments by worthy design thinkers.

In all fairness, the intention here is not to be an exhaustive encyclopedia-style collection, but rather an easy resource covering distinctive accomplishments by worthy design thinkers. Each feature skims the surface of each visionary without going much deeper into their personal motivations, thought processes or career goals.

A very nice affordable reproduction One impressive thing about Rand’s book to me was always how much he was able to say about the nature of good design in 96 short pages (with the majority of those pages reproductions of his work). He was a master at arriving at designs that boiled down the essence of the intended messages, and he renders out the heart of basic design philosophy in this book.

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Type Matters!

Ready to Print: Handbook for Media Designers

How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

By Krisina Nickel, 2011, Flexibound Gestalten, 320 pages, English, 44.50€, softcover

By Jim Williams, Ben Casey, 2012, Leather Bound Merrell Publishers, 160 Pages, English, 25.90€, hardcover

GUIDE

Insights about graphic This Book have a great amount of interesting technical information. One thing that is curious, is the chapter about typography and layout, the book doesn’t play by the rules it advocates like a maximun indent for paragraph and so on, but personally i don’t see a problem with that, since the book is following the crazy trends in contemporary design, and frankly i was atracted by it’s strange and minimal design.

An amazing close looking This book recalls the wise words of the great Jan Tschichold: ‘The greatest benefit from looking at good work will always be gained by those who study its finest details and subtleties. This is the only way to teach oneself typographic design.…’ Critical close-looking is an invaluable tool for anyone working with type and Type Matters!, a delight to look at, read and hold, is a handy way to sharpen the eye.

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Questione di sguardi.

Design your life

Sette inviti al vedere fra storia dell’arte e quotidianità

By Vince Frost, 2014, Design, Random House Australia pub.

232 pages, English, 23.32€, hardcover

By John Berger, Flexibound Gestalten, Il Saggiatore, 2015, 166 pages, Italian, 11.90€, softcover

A book about honesty design With suggestion to your daily routine including, eating a frog each morning, collaborating and learning from your mistakes, Vince hits the nail on the head with this book, with a health dose of humorous anecdotes. His motivational narratives are similar to those you might hear from a taxi driver and with additional quotes from the leading lights in the design industry.

Look and see A classic where art and sociology, psychology and philosophy intertwine, making this text is a true inter-intradisciplinary work. It is really a question (an enigmatic question) of looks: of ways to see.

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Andrea Giubbolini

EVENTS GUIDE In this form we like to suggest events all over the world about design and communication

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01. UX STRAT Europe 2018: discussions about the latest trends of design What: UX STRAT is a conference that brings together experience design leaders, strategists, researchers, and senior professionals to hear about and discuss the latest trends in strategic UX / CX / Product / Service Design. Carefully curated presentations focus on the intersection of business strategy, user experience, customer experience, product design, and service design. UX STRAT is single track, which promotes a strong sense of community, and provides ample networking opportunities. There will be one day of workshops, followed by two days of single-track conference presentations.

When: From June 6th to June 12th Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands Web: https://www.nfiere.com/grafitalia/

02. User Research: meeting some of the world best design and ux researchers What: “By user researchers, for user researchers. Join us in June for the UK’s first full day conference focused on user research. Bringing together some of the world’s best user research speakers to begin discussions on how we can further our progression of user research.” The first day you will hear from some of the worlds best design and UX researchers. The second day with the workshop you will have your chance to get involved and put into practice the things you’ve learnt at event User Research London 2018.

When: From June 21th to June 22th Where: London, UK Web: https://www.nfiere.com/grafitalia/

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CRITIQUE SPRING 2018

AWARENESS

03. Future of Branding Week: exploration week of approaches in brand communication design What: Explore how companies can express themselves using new channels and evolving technologies and what is the key to future-proofing a brand. This one-week learning expedition for brand strategists, creative directors and heads of marketing will help you stay up-to-date with the newest trends in the industry and find new ways to work with your creative team. Programme includes talks, round-table discussions, mini-workshops, studio visits and professional discussions.

When: From June 25th to June 29th Where: London, UK Web: https://futurelondonacademy.co.uk

04. UX Australia: hands on design workshops for learning and inspiration What: UX Australia is Australia’s premier User Experience Design conference, now in its 10th year, with workshops and presentations to suit everyone from graduates to experienced practitioners. Two days of hands-on workshops focus on practical skills and techniques that can help you get started, learn new methods and tools or explore new ideas in detail. Two full days of local and international conference presentations covering a huge range of topics and ideas relevant to experienced practitioners, newbies and everyone in between.

When: From August 28th to August 31th Where: Melbourne, Australia Web: http://www.uxaustralia.com.au

05. Design Matters: talks on “nerd tracks” exploring the theme of design

06. Typecon: an occasion for promoting, studying and supporting typography

What: This two-day conference is perfect for UI and UX designers, with an impressive line-up of speakers including Netflix product designer Alex Bronkie, Amazon design director Masuma Henry, Minecraft experience design director Tobias Ahlin and design director Anisha Jain. The conference itself admits it has competent, visionary and nerdy talks, workshops and discussions with an all-new ‘nerd tracks’, which explores a range of design topics more in depth. This year, the conference will explore three themes: Design for Change, Immersive Worlds & Mixed Realities and Be a Design Rebel.

When: From September 26th to September 27th Where: Copenhagen, Denmark Web: https://designmatters.io/

What: TypeCon is an annual conference presented by the non-profit Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA), an international organisation dedicated to the promotion, study, and support of typography and related arts.Since the inaugural conference in 1998, TypeCon has explored type for the screen, printing history, Dutch design, typein motion, Arabic calligraphy, the American Arts and Crafts movement, experimental typography, webfonts, and much more. Special events include the Type & Design Education Forum, and an exhibition of international type and design.

When: From August 1st to August 5th Where: Portland, Oregon, USA Web: http://www.typecon.com

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The story of William Drenttel Bod Noorda’s Metro project Interview: Vince Frost Braille font by Christian Boer Interview: Neville Brody and much more.

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