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Table of Contents Who Is Louise Fili?
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Louise Fili Ltd.
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Restaurant Design
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Product Packaging
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Book Design
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Type Design & Exhibits
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Conclusion
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References
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INTRODUCTION
Who is Louise Fili?
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ouise Fili is an American graphic designer who is most known for her pretty and elegant style of typography. The majority of her design work draws influence from the art deco movement and the elaborate styles of the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s. She also integrates her love of her Italian culture and background into nearly every work she creates. She was born in 1951 and raised in Orange, New Jersey to Italian parents. As a child, she fostered a great passion for creating lettering and design, often expressing herself by discretely carving letterforms into her bedroom walls, much to her parents’ chagrin. When she was a young teen, she would design her own illuminated manuscripts of Bob Dylan song lyrics and make attempts at designing her own custom book covers, imagining that one day she would be an acclaimed fiction writer. However, she was never quite interested in writing the fiction that would accompany many of these book covers.
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Louise included many of the signs that inspired her, such as the sign above, in a book she later wrote entitled The Signs of Italy.
While Louise studied studio art at Skidmore College in New York, several opportunities to work in the campus typeshop affirmed these design passions and led her to become engulfed in the world of lettering. Her final senior project at Skidmore was an Italian cookbook lettered entirely by hand; it was primarily inspired by books that she had seen during family trips to Italy. During those trips, she was also influenced by Italy's decorative signs, which have since had a great impact on her personal style of typography.
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L "The Lubalin studio was a typophile’s dream. The attention given to letterforms was unlike anything in my experience." Louise Fili
ouise completed a brief summer internship with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and transferred over to the School of Visual Arts for her last semester of college. When Louise graduated college in 1973, she did a small amount of freelance design across the Manhattan and then worked as a senior designer under the widely-idolized Herb Lubalin, who hired her immediately after she came into his studio and showed him her portfolio. She helped Herb with his various print projects and they became relatively close friends and design partners. She claims that his overall attention to typography and very "mesmerizing" thought processes when designing greatly helped her develop and achieve her own style and finesse. Many would say that the two share a lot of stylistic similarities; both use type as an expressive tool which shape the pieces they create.
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Like Louise, Herb was firmly against the heavy use of technology in design. Louise views technology as more of a hindrance rather than an advantage; she believes that that contemporary designers who heavily rely on computer programs to create pieces are holding themselves back. To her, there is much more detail that can be included in a piece once you complete it by hand. Today, Louise continues to work by hand and refuses to render her pieces digitally until the end of her design process.
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n 1978, Louise left Lubalin's company and became the art director of Pantheon Books, a publishing company owned by Random House. After receiving commercial success for designing the cover of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (seen left), she was given the chance to design over 2,000 book covers for Pantheon. Many of her designs broke the mold of how book covers typically were during that era. They tended to favor a more classic approach, revitalizing fonts that had been used in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s to prove that retro and vintage designs could be utilized in contemporary settings.
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To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the uniďŹ cation of Italy, Louise redesigned ten of the country's most widely-acclaimed and culture-shaping novels (seen above). She firmly believes that a book cover doesn't need to shout or be "obnoxiously" designed to capture a person’s attention; to her, simplicity is the key to a successful book cover.
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BRANCHING OUT
Louise Fili Ltd.
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fter working at Pantheon Books for nearly eleven years, Louise decided to branch off and start her own design company named Louise Fili Ltd. She wanted to focus on what she viewed as her three true loves: food, type, and all things Italian. She also knew that she wanted to focus on small businesses rather than huge corporations; it was important for her to connect personally with the companies who sought work from her. Louise was initially hesitant on naming her company after herself, as she worried that potential employers would discriminate against her for being female; in the 1980s, female-run companies were few and far between. However, she firmly decided that if an employer didn’t want to hire her because she was a woman, she didn’t want to work with them anyways.
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AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Restaurant Design
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he first area of expertise Louise Fili Ltd. focuses on is restaurant rebranding. Louise’s impact on the restaurant scene in New York is impossible to ignore because she has had a hand in the majority of rebranding done for the West End’s most beloved eateries. Such restaurants include The Mermaid Oyster Bar, Via Carota (seen above), L’Arte Del Gelato, Italienne, Pearl Oyster Bar, Juliana's Pizza, and Claudette.
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Her redesigns of these restaurants, many of which are Italian, display her style and influences quite well. Many of her logos, menu designs, and promotional materials are inspired by twentieth-century Italian posters. They are simple, elegant, and refined, and though they clearly have roots in old-fashioned art deco work, they don’t appear obsolete or outmoded when they are compared to other contemporary logos and designs. Louise's redesign of Via Carota is a prime example of this. Even using a color like brown, which tends to be considered old or dated, fits well with this theme. Throughout the span of her career, she has always been able to evoke a very sophisticated sense of timelessness that works well and stands strong in any decade.
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AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Product Packaging
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nother large area that Louise Fili Ltd. focuses on is product packaging for various food companies. Compared to her restaurant branding and logo design, her product packaging is much more rich and vibrant in color; however, they still maintain her signature old-style approach. Louise has famously claimed that food products with suberb packaging often "taste better" than ones that have a poor design.
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Out of all of the companies she’s worked for, Louise has done the most design work for Sarabeth’s, a bakery-kitchen company that was initially reluctant to update their food packaging. Her redesign certainly brings an air of elegance and rich quality to the brand that had been missing before. Sarabeth's owner claims that partnering with Louise and having her input was one of the best business decisions she's ever made.
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Another large area that Louise Fili Ltd. focuses on is product packaging for various food companies. Compared to her restaurant branding and logo design, her product packaging is much more rich and vibrant in color; however, they still maintain her signature oldstyle approach. Out of all of
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Louise has also assisted with creative work for a wide variety of Italian and French wine companies. Louise likes to refer to her wine labels as “mini-posters” because of their high attention to detail and close similarity to twentieth-century European typographic posters. Her use of color stands apart from other wine brands that favor more neutral colors; by making her designs more loud, she is catching the attention of customers who may be passing by.
Louise has also done creative work for a variety of Italian and French wine companies. Louise refers to her wine labels as “mini-posters” because of their high attention to detail and similarity to twentieth-century Italian typographic posters. Her use of color stands apart from other wine brands that favor more neutral colors; by making her designs more loud, she is catching the attention of customers passing by.
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Apart from food and wine, Louise has also done stationary packaging and postage for the United States Postal Service. Two of her most popular stamps, issued in 2012, 2013, and 2017, were designed specifically for Valentine’s Day; they are the smallest designs Louise has ever made and have had the largest print run. Her pencil boxes, which are equipped with double-sided graphic pencils, are a shimmering twist on the colors and charm of old Italian pencil boxes.
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AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Book Design
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nother large area of expertise Louise Fili Ltd. focuses on is book cover design. Louise and her husband, another well-renowned graphic designer named Steven Heller, have written and designed over twenty books about typography and design. Louise claims that her experience working with Herb Lubalin and at Pantheon Books truly had an impact on her passion for book design. However, it is worthwhile to note that many of her newer covers are much more fine in detail than her Pantheon covers, which were more minimalistic. The insides of these books, such as Grafica Della Strada (seen above and right) often focus on images rather than text.
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Louise and Heller’s colorful Deco series was a series of books that focused on the art deco and typographic design of Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other European countries during the twentieth century. Each of the countries’ varying styles are reflected accurately in their covers. The series was very successful due to their design.
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Inside the books, Louise enjoys having fun with her page designs, especially the ones that readers typically skip over, such as the copyright pages. In many of the cookbooks Louise has designed for Sarabeth’s, she has shaped the copyright text into different shapes, such as cutlery or a coffee cup.
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AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Type Design & Exhibits
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he last area of expertise that Louise Fili Ltd. focuses on is type design. Louise has made three overall. Her first typeface, Marseille, is inspired by French art deco. Her second, Montecatini, takes cues from twentieth-century art nouveau and Italian travel posters. Her last typeface, Mardell, is inspired by the Italian Futurist movement and was designed for a wood type museum in Mardell, Wisconsin.
Over the years, Louise has done a lot of design work for the School of Visual Arts in New York, which she now works at. The school is also located fairly close to many of the West End restaurants she has rebranded. After winning various graphic art awards and a lifetime achievement award from the AIGA in 2014, the School of Visual Arts celebrated Louise by opening an exhibit (seen right) that was meant to be a comprehensive display of her book jacket, branding, food packaging, and restaurant identity work. The exhibit itself was designed to look as closely as possible to an old Italian street and house with all of her works weaved throughout. This, of course, thrilled Louise.
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Conclusion
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n summary, Louise Fili’s various bodies of work prove that everything old can be made new again with the right amount of passion and attention to detail. Similarly, contemporary design doesn’t always have to be totally contemporary. There is an elegance and beauty in including elements of older design in new pieces; Louise has certainly mastered the art of this throughout the span of her career. Though the nature of design is always shifting, Louise's work will always be timeless.
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References Danzico, Elizabeth. “2014 AIGA Medalist: Louise Fili.” AIGA, 1 Mar. 2014, www. aiga.org/medalist-louise-fili. Fili, Louise, and Nicola Bednarek. Brower. Elegantissima: the Design and Typography of Louise Fili. Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Fili, Louise. “Louise Fili Ltd.” Louise Fili Ltd, 2018, www.louisefili.com/. Martin, Simon. “How Louise Fili Became a Graphic Design Icon.” Ceros Originals, 9 Apr. 2018, www.ceros.com/originals/design-legend-louise-fili/. Mattei, Paolo. “Interview with Louise Fili: Graphic Art on the Road.” Italian Ways, 26 Sept. 2014, www.italianways.com/louise-fili-graphic-art-on-the-road/. Petit, Zachary. “The Beautiful Work of Louise Fili.” Print Magazine, 12 Jan. 2015, www.printmag.com/featured/the-beautiful-work-of-louise-fili/. Stone, Terri. “Tipografia Deliziosa: Louise Fili.” Adobe Create Magazine, 6 Oct. 2016, www.create.adobe.com/2015/10/6/tipografia_deliziosa_louise_fili.html. Strizver, Ilene. “The Fabulously Talented Louise Fili.” CreativePro, 26 Oct. 2017, creativepro.com/louise-fili/.
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Written and Designed by Sarah Chaplin
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