[1995#04] are letters things?

“Letters are things, not pictures of things”, wrote Eric R Gill in his Essay on Typography. Is that sentence still true?
The history shows us that the actual, real manifestations of the presence of the human beings on the earth, in short what remains through the long ages of our collective life as an evoluting kind of social animal with a peculiar structure of body, brain and behaviour, sophisticately adapted for his reproduction thanks to a process of selective replica/recombination of the genetic code, intimately of digital rather than analogue nature, are artifacts, as opposed to the natural products or, better to say, gifts that all other animals benefit.
The artifacts (things made by art, literally: expression and goal of craftmanship oriented by a more or less specific purpose, which distinguishes them from the “tools” of some other animals), have a doublefaced, somehow positively ambiguous nature (well expressed by the Janus image), both as (1) prosthetic extensions of our body—so may be conceived and understood the tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a way that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted; and as (2) expression of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs of communication and memory (that give birth to the history, which then differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is)—so may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest being the only one presuming to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts. So we may say, at the same time, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and have always a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, ornament, ie an expressive and functional meaning applied to nature’s matters, a surplus given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning?
Without form the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase when the man gives him a form, when he trasform his absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of forging his shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter kept from a natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to receive a form (more or less complex, that’s not the point) to become artifact, part of human inheritance of history and “built” environment.
And, finally, it has to be pointed that a great part of the material, actual history of our artifacts is the history of a changing relationship between “carving”, “tracing”, “signing” (note: those are not at all the same, as they differ and so imply variables attitudes/gestures) tools/media and a support: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus (that means column, in greek, that becomes so the basis of the “classical” system of structural/architectural proportions, relations and not always written but visible rules, from which we so often misunderstand “style” as expression of a general art conception in a specific period of time), the wall/wood/canvas and the tinted brush, the tracing/vellum paper and the pencil, the sketches paper and the chalk/watercolored brush/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, and so expensive) papyrus/paper or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, and so on: the electronic beam and the phosphor coated glass of the monitor aren’t on the same evolutive line? Please note that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate pulsive nature, has always been the “how”, and not but if superficially the “what”, from a creative internal point of view, that has to be assumed, in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, to objectivate in form/matter the contents of his memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
The alphabetic system of signs we use, after a long selective process of evolution, is one of these artifacts we are talking about, and one of the most conservative yet, in may ways; let’s think both to the extraordinary permanence of the order in which the letters are in the set, and as well the sound/form and often meaning relations that many of the letters still have, after about five thousand years, and check wheter there are so many other so refined artifacts with such a degree of duration: for example, the phoenician original g, the gamal that means camel, soon to be the greek gamma, not to talk about a, aleph the taurus, soon to be the greek alpha, and so on. And what has to strongly underlined is that the alpabeth is really a systematic artifact, a complex decision on communication design: about 2700 years BC someone (that means a group of people not merely one), in a short period of time decided that this one, the alphabet, was the most economic and effective mean, in terms of communication, of recording the words (letters are sound for words, to quote again Gill and his Essay), of having a collective memory of events and emotions. So they built the foundations of the western civilization, even if for centuries it was based more on the ear than on the eye, more on sounds (that explains the role of rythmic poetry and mnemonic techniques in the ancient world) than on signs; but visible signs slowly gained importance, within the evolution of technology (ie the relation between tool/support, and the decreasing of related investments/costs) being the more stable way of transmitting ideas/events. “Verba volant—said the latins—scripta manent”: the permanence of writing, of the words, of the sequences of letters is the continuity/transmission of our civilizations. At this point, it is important to underline too that there is again a double, interplaying genesis or, better to say, very slow evolution of the letterforms: (1) an architectural path, that descend from carving the (painted) letters on buildings and walls, a kind of engraving/etching, anyhow a scratching on a surface/support to have a cavity, something emptied (or a relief, it is the same, as you push out of a surface that stays behind, that recedes to a background: so this kind of letters done in metal fusion are conceptually identical), that suggest a clear economy of forms/proportions to be seen mostly looking up, and a set to be normalised in order to respond to a proper brief of a power ruling, over a great part of the world, so many different nations, as roman empire was, that at the end means the capitals, the uppercase set, and a trend towards a set of monograms, of graphic devices, separated for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind typography; (2) a pictorial path, that descend from different signing tools applied to a absorbing surface/support, as exemplified before, that at the end means the lowercase set, that evolved slower and reached his final form later than the capitals, and a trend towards a set of polygrams, of graphic devices, united for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind calligraphy and survives in other letter system, as many of the oriental ones. Figures have then their own separated history, related to a mathematics system conception/visualisation based on 0 and decimals, that means in short we use an indian/arabic signs set, which came in our alphabetical system very late, through the mediterranean cultural exchanges of late Middle–age held in Italy. So our alphabet now is a complex organism, a body that absorbed an evoluting selective replication of his own, a contraddictory artifact who mixes and compromises two (if you include the figures, three) autonomous and self–sufficient letter systems: ancient inscriptions (letters on stone) were all in capitals, often with no spacing in between and no points commas etc, giving no trouble at all to the reader (and that’s the point about readability/legibility of letters/types: mostly, habit—otherwise how should we explain the Gutenberg set of black letters?) .So it’s seems that one system was enough at a certain level but not enough refined for more sophisticated details/levels of recording/communicating events, emotions and ideas. This second process of “natural” writing, of manual replication of volumina (surfaces to be rolled—but note a meaningful similarity of “volumes” in the field of literature and architecture as “composition” mean) and biblia (made of paperlike matter, rare, scarce and costly resource/surface for centuries: byblos, the Babel cane or papyrus to be carefully opened derolled overimposed, layer over layer, resulting in a very fragile support, or the real paper, fruit of a late technology that came from Far–East) from the latin scribas to the Middle–age scriptoria of monasteries came in a way to an end with modern printing, not a true invention but simply a combination of different technologies in Western world (movable words, the relatives of movable type, are known, not only in Far–east civilization, to exist long time before printing, as well as—mostly religious— images to be replicated for popular consume). From the half of the XVth Century, the printing press becomes the first industry process, and the paradigmatic model of all industrialisation, centuries before the Industrial Revolution, of which is the actual prototype. But at the beginning of this techological evolution, that built the way our civilisation transmits the contents of his culture and therefore the way in which is produced, perceived, diffused, and moreover the power of the eye vs the ear that still marks our time, the aim was to improve the speed of natural writing: the artificial writing, as it was called at the beginning, was trying to replicate a manual process through “machines”. And the conceptual tools, the cultural mentality needed some tens of years to be aware that the artificial writing was something new, and completely different from handwriting replica. Something radically changed: the letters, in order to be printed in lines in the page, by the way in which this technology is done, must be separated, must be monograms, inverting the trend towards polygrams of natural handwriting, well and highly expressed by calligraphy, art of lettering in itself, centripetal individual pulsion towards the ego expression, in front of to the centrifugal pulsion towards social communication, intimately connaturated with the printing. In printing, letters are physically separated, also if we perceive them united in words, by grouping and use of space: it’s a perceptive/cultural illusion, not too far from the color separation of images that we phisiologically perceive as continuous at the proper distance but are formed by tiny dots or the illusion on movement of the movies, that are only sequences of static photogram, of single pictures.
Well, let’s go back to the question, letters are still things as they were/are in printing and, before and still, in handwriting?
Another (r)evolution has occurred, the coming of digital over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our mentality and cultural habits seem often to be a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. But it appears clear that a new surface/support is the screen (whatever resolution now have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new media what were television, movie, radio, computer environments), a tracing tool is the light, the electronic beams that excites the phospor dots disseminated on the glass screen. So, the challenge in that field for visual/graphic designers, the border to be dangerously crossed before other people with no training but more bravery occupies all the land, the digital Far West, seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dinamic/acoustic dimension to the “page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen already fixed format/proportion—most probably they have to work with thousand of colors and 14 inches diagonal of a rectangle for a while, to reach the average audience)”, giving more depth than the relation of type/text and images/pictures on the “white” paper.
And the challenge for type designers in that field (printing will last long, as long as lasted handwriting, that is still in good health: types for printing will evolve and improve anyway, under digital realm: let’s look at the last 10 years to confirm that—but this is not the point I’m focusing) seems to be the screen type, the digital letter, where there is no more a resaon if not the old habit of thinking the type design in terms of monograms—and this is fully confirmed by the evolution of type formats towards fonts with ligatures and intelligent self–connections, that precisely shows a process of polygrammatisation of letters, of fusion in groups, more and more sophisticated, that maybe will extends to the words and, perhaps, to the sentences, walking over again the rows of calligraphy, going back on the old paths of not–western civilisations to go further on. The future has an old heart, as it lies on the past.
History most probably never repeats itself, but it is useful to think that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, that started with the (r)evolution of printing: we’ve been crossed by the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission/communication/conservation of events and ideas but we don’t know yet, and we aren’t perhaps fully aware yet of all the implications of this new age; our mind is standing, but never as now the letter designers had such a powerful tools on their own hands, provided they use the tool number one, a grey jelly 70% water, kept safe in a mervelous designed packaging, our brain. The designers may design, produce, distribute and sell with relatively small investments, as it was in the second half of XVth Century; the pressure of great companies on the market may strangle all, but there is an inertial slowness of these companies that leaves some chanches, at least for a while. The alphabet designers must not miss their chance, and surrender in a competion that is a selective evolution, as cruel as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear. And let’s say, in short, that also all the copyright problem has to be approached in completely new terms; the laws may only follow the society evolution, not to prefigure it. What strictly means, now, “copy”: that you have an “original”, from which you get “copies”—but in the digital realm, the original and the copy are absolutely the same. So, where is the border? We have to completely rethink the matter, and thinking still neeeds some effort, and time.
Letters are things and pictures of things, both physical objects carved/inked on a absorbing surface/support, as well as immaterials made visible by the light on another emitting surface/support, both things meant to express/vehiculate something that they carry on as well as expressive in itself for itself, altogether now. This is only a temptative conclusion. But let me quote again, for a circular ending of the story and with a question to start a new talk, some other words of Eric Gill: “Lettering is a precise art and strictly subject to tradition. The New Art notion that you can make letters whatever shapes you like, is as foolish as the notion, if anyone has such a notion, that you can make houses any shapes you like. You can't, unless you live all by yourself on a desert island”.

[1995#03] italo lupi

A Global Approach: The Italian Way To Design
Yes, it is: there is, in my opinion, an Italian, own peculiar way to design, almost in the second half of XXth Century, when the Gutenberg era—more than five centuries of cultural production/transmission through paper and ink, which begon as a (r)evolution of handwriting, that anyway hasn’t disappeared—seems near to be replaced, or better, to be sided by a new communication model: the information bits. In our times, as a matter of fact, another (r)evolution in the cultural tools/media as the Gutenbergian one has occurred, the coming of digital environment over or, better to say, beside to the analogical one, but our mentality and cultural habits seem to be a hard border, a strong limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that as a new medium is the screen (it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in something different what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), so a new tool is the light, the electronic beam that excite the phosphorous dots coated on a glass screen, the image pixels. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will invade all the digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?), giving to the designer a new, unseen, unexplored dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if very dangerous) freedom on manipulating/using images and texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is allowed to say, in a metaphoric way, that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the production, transmission, communication, conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet what it really means, and perhaps we aren’t fully aware of all the implications of that—anyway we’re going, somewhere. Never as now the designers had such extraordinary tools and powers on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competition that is simply selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will most probably disappear. They should be aware that their specialization and knowledge in a complex professional field, as visual design is, is a true social need, more and more hard to keep, as competition increases and technology furiously evolves; at the same time, the specialization in itself is a danger, as it risks to limit the look into a stare—culture is an open eye and acts like a bee: cross–fertilization is the guarantee of surviving, not only in the biological sphere.
Well, what’s have to do all this with Italy? It has to do, since the Italian way is an example, in many cases, of cultural hybridization and openness, a model of education not to be forgotten, not merely to be followed as it is, but at least to be understood in his own. Not by chance, probably, many of the Italian designers, and also many of the leading figures in fields other than graphic design, have been trained or, at least, have studied in architectural schools (the Milan Polytechnic being the most common): where humanistic, art and historical studies are faced to a scientific and technological instruction all together, to give a global approach to the “project” design. To quote someone, as art historians, movie directors, fashion designers, photographers, painters, illustrators, industrial designers, exhibition designers, let’s say that studied architecture: Tafuri, Antonioni, Lattuada, Ferré, Ballo, Basilico, Scolari, Cantàfora, Serafini, Baldessari, Mollino, Castiglioni, Stoppino, Colombo, Zanuso, Sottsass, Bellini, Mendini, Pesce, La Pietra, Branzi, Piva, De Lucchi, Di Puolo; and, in the field of our interest: Nizzoli, Carboni, Grignani, Muratore, Vignelli, Waibl, Sambonet, Bonfante, Fronzoni, Cerri, Origoni, Canale, Camuffo, Vetta—not to forget that Saul Steinberg studied architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he started his career. It means also that many of those people are not only graphic designers, but most of them work in an across, transversal field, from “the spoon to the city”. And a critical point of view related only to one side of their work is most often ineffective, giving a distorted perception of the multifaceted approach to design that qualify Italian designers: “progettisti”, that means something more and, at least, something different than “designers”—words, said the ancients, are “imago animi”, images of the mind.
Italo Lupi
The work of Italo Lupi has to be seen as emblematical of such a peculiar Italian creative landscape, where a more or less absolute lack of specialized schools of design has been (and still was, until latest years) replaced by the architectural faculties, with original results. For that reason, his work may be understood only as a kind of ‘plural’ tension to design, which is one as a field, many as objects: the art is an unity, of which the artifacts are the different expressions.
Born in Cagliari in 1934, after classic high school studies, Lupi graduated as a matter of fact in architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he studied, ia, with Franco Albini, a great master of Italian architecture and design. Here Lupi had, in his own recent words, “a vast and non–specialized preparation which sufficiently enlarged your horizons to enable you to consider your professional domain with a more desenchanted look: it prepares you not to take for granted any bigoted preconceptions about communication”. The architectural, three–dimensional training to actual complexity of a design process directly reflects in his approach to visual design: “Some graphic problems might have a three–dimensional solution. The consideration of a third dimension—he said—allows you to face complexity, to better understand the design, because you are used to taking in to account more data”: the covers of “Domus” with holes or cuts that offer glimpses on the ‘second’ cover are a clear demonstration of all that. And, adds Lupi, “I have found that the training of an architect often adds to my way of dealing with the work I do now—its three–dimensional vision contributes to not accepting the impositions and limits of the typographical cage. The attempt to translate a two–dimensional into a three–dimensional does not have to exclude the enrichment given from the infringement of rules; those rules serve to rationally channel the data of a project”. From 1966, he was assistant for some years at the Polytechnic School of Milan of Piergiacomo Castiglioni—one of the famous three Castiglioni brothers, masters of Italian design, and sons of a famous monumental sculptor of the Twenties and Thirties in Italy—, and then he opened his own office in 1972. In a interview, Lupi has revealed—remembering, from his youthness, in the years immediately after the WW 2, to the beginnings of his career as designer—some actual sources of his interest in graphic design, ie four magazines: the British “Il Mese” (The Month), a monthly international news magazine published in England, which arrived in Italy with the allied troops, where he saw for the first time works by Ardizzone, Bawden, Kempster–Evans and Thurber, of whom he was specially fond; two Italian comics magazines of the atferwar times, the “Asso di Picche” (Ace of Spades), which was publishing strips mainly by Italian—better to say, Venetian—comics designers, as the internationally known ‘master of Malamocco’ Hugo Pratt (the father of Corto Maltese stories)—who recently has disappeared—and others as Bellavitis or Ongaro, and “Robinson”, which was publishing mainly American strips, such those by Chester Gould or Milton Caniff (interesting to note that Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, author of the fiction bestseller The Name of the Rose , wrote in the Sixties some exciting pages on Steve Canyon in his book Apocalittici e integrati); and, last but not least, the “Ark” magazine, designed by students of the London Royal College of Art such as Alan Fletcher and the soon–to–be named Pentagram, in the Sixties. At that times, the interest of Lupi for design begon with a collaboration with ‘la Rinascente’ (‘the reborning’, a headline written after the WW 1 by the decadentist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio), then the main Italian department store and a kind of seminal place for design, where the internal R&Design Office was headed by the architect Carlo Pagani, helped by Max Huber for graphic design (the famous company logo is from the Huber’s hands). For ‘la Rinascente’, Lupi worked on furniture and packaging with the internationally known architect/designer Mario Bellini and on interior design with Augusto Morello, who is now editor of the new series (1994) of the “Stile Industria” historical Italian magazine on design, and president of Adi. Shortly after, at the beginning of the Seventies, Lupi started to design his first magazine, “Shop”. During his career, Lupi has then designed many periodicals, including “Pubblicità Domani”, “Progex” and “Contretemps” (a French literary magazine), and he has been art director of magazines such as “Giornale della Lombardia” “If Rivista della Fondazione Ibm”, “Zodiac”, “Domus” (from the second half of the Eighties, when Mario Bellini was appointed editor, to the beginning of the Nineties). From 1992, he is both art director and editor of “Abitare”, the Italian magazine on architecture, home, town and environment living, with a printing run of nearly 100,000 copies, of whom he was already art director, from 1974 to 1985, when he left for “Domus”. With Alberto Marangoni, Lupi designed in 1979 a famous (and really three–dimensional) XVI Triennale corporate image, that he has redesigned later, followed from then on by a very long list of—both public and privately commissioned—sign and information designs (such as those for Milan light railway, Lombardia regional parks, Tokyo design center), corporate designs (such as those for International Design Conference of Aspen, the Chiba municipality, the Poldi Pezzoli museum of Milan), book and poster designs—a paradigmatic sample of his careful, complex and original approach to the book is Printed in Italy, designed in 1988, where he also directed the work of 9 illustrators, 9 graphic designers and 19 photographers, with total freedom of paper, typesetting equipments and printing. Member of Agi (the Alliance graphique internationale) and Adi (the Italian chartered designers society), Lupi has been teacher at the Isia in Urbino, the main (of a really few) school for graphic design in Italy, and at the Summer Courses of the Institute for the Human Environment in San Francisco. It seems that, of all the Italian graphic designers, Lupi is the one most attentive and curious to what happens on the other side of the Ocean, to what may be called an American graphic flavour, and of the Channel, as he shows the greatest appreciation for British visual design, from the XIXth Century tradition of children’s books onwards (he confesses that he has often missed a train in the London Underground with the wealth of graphic material on tube stations). So, it is easy to recognize the influences of, let’s say, Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast or, going backwards, of Leo Lionni (the great italo–dutch–american master, one of Lupi’s heroes) on some of his graphic works; and this is perhaps one of the reasons why he has recently engaged Steven Guarnaccia in a regular collaboration for “Abitare”: “everything I do, I do mostly for fun”. “Not taking for granted any preconceptions about communication”, fertilized with this way of visual thinking, the Anglo–Saxon Bildhaftes Denken, is at the root the Lupi approach to the type/text as image, and to image as text, breaking the (habit) rules with a three–dimensional attitude at the base: “the rigour of Max Huber and Swiss–style graphics blended with Italian invention and Anglo–Saxon wit” is the Lupi solution, in its own words. His interest in type is clearly “one of the basic aspects of my work—Lupi says—, together with the efforts I make not to use type in a conventional way. I love to mix different styles”
But it has not to be forgotten that Lupi is also a very gifted interior and exhibition designer. During the Sixties, he was assistant to Achille—another one of the brothers—Castiglioni in Montecatini and Rai (the Italian broadcasting corporation) exhibition designs; and the Lupi talent is showed by the exhibitions about XVIIIth Century art at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Parma of I980 in collaboration with Guido Canali, and in the same year for the Compasso d’oro Design Award exhibition in Milan, the Ferruccio Parri exhibition at the Besana in Milan of 1985, the XVII Milan Triennale exhibition of 1988 in collaboration with Achille Castiglioni and Paolo Ferrari, the automobile museum Ferrari at Maranello (Modena) of 1989, the Supermarket of Style exhibition for Pitti Image in Florence of 1994, and in the same year the Renaissance architectural exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice with Mario Bellini, but also in the interior sign and decoration design for a cruise ship of the Costa navigation company, the Costa Marina. And these are not another, different stories. Lupi is a designer in Italy, a place where Renaissance and digital world, past and present, arts and technologies should try to live, side by side: “to make memories live in every new work without them becoming an obstruction—confirms Lupi—, but to recognise them as the substantial base for new linguistics, is true graphic vitality”.

[1995#02] franco grignani

Selected Works By Franco Grignani
When we discuss about the graphic design matter, actually we always face artifacts, literally things made by an art: expression and goal of a craftmanship, oriented by a more or less specific goal (which distinguishes these artifacts from the “tools” of animals other than the man). The artifacts have a double, positively ambiguous nature, a kind of Janus face. As a matter of fact, artifacts are prosthetis, extensions and potentiation of our body; in this way may be conceived and understood the human tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a path that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted. At the same time, the artifacts are the express ion of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs for communication and memory, that gave birth to history, which in itself differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is; in this way may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest one, the only being able to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts, where taxonomically the graphic design is framed. So we may say, all together, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and that the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and always has a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, in itself ornament, ie an expressive/functional surplus applied to nature’s materials, something given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning? Without the configuration of form, the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase only when the man gives to the clay a form, when he trasform the absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of moulding a shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter, so freed from the natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to take a form (with a more or less complex shape/meaning, that’s not the point) to become artifact, to be part of the human inheritance of history and “built” environment: it needs a Gestaltung.
It has to be pointed now that the material, actual history of our artifacts is mostly the history of changing relationships, mutual exchanges, happy anachronisms and strong anticipations, between “carving”, “tracking”, “signing” tools (which imply different attitudes/gestures) and the “media”, the “carriers”: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus, the wall/wood/canvas and the dipped brush, the paper and the pencil/chalk/watercolor/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, so expensive) papyrus or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, and more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, the paper and the toner charged by a laser beam, the film silver emulsion beamed by the light, and now the monitor (an emitting light glass screen coated with phosphoric pixels) and the electronic beam. With this approach, we come to conclude that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate nature, has always been “how” the artifacts are dne, instead of “what” they represent. From a creative perspective, which has to be assumed in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, is the Gestaltung process to objectivate in form/matter the contents of artistic memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
In our times, another (r)evolution in the relations of tools/media has occurred, the coming of digital era over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our menthality and cultural habits seems to be too often like a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that the new medium is the screen (whichever resolution it will have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new medium what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), the new tool is the light, the beams that excite the phosporic dots disseminated on a glass screen. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will occupy all this digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?)”, giving to the designer a new unseen dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if dangerous) freedom on manipulating/trating the images/texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is an useful metaphor to say that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission / communication / conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet all about that, and perhaps aren’t fully aware yet of all the implications of that, anyway we’re going somewhere. Never as now the designers had such powerful tools on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain, our mind. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competion that is a kind of selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear.
The selected works of Franco Grignani* to be seen in these pages prove once and for all the primacy of mind, of conception, of Gestaltung process for the visual design: a true artist is the one who is able to dream and build the tools of his work, indipendently of the actual media, standing on the past, looking for the future.

* Note
Alone master, the Italian visual designer, painter and photographer Franco Grignani, born in Pieve Porto Morone (Pavia) in 1908, trained as architect at the Polytechnic School of Turin (1929–33); after being part as painter of the late, second futurism, his artistic research came across the European abstract avantgarde movements, and developed a strong interested in the perception psichology of form, that results from the Fifties in his dinamic kind of OpArt, years before it: the mastering of perception rules is expressed by his visual experiments on virtual movement, optical illusion, subperceptions, distortions, moirés, dilatations, flous and so on, applied, with no breaks, from painting to graphic design, through pictures, images, patterns, signs and words. From the Thirties he works in the field of graphic design, collaborating ia with Borletti, Breda Nardi, Cremona Nuova, Dompé, Domus, Mondadori, Montecatini, Spi, Triennale; his artistic direction for Alfieri&Lacroix printing firm is particularly interesting, as it shows an exceptional integration of words (wrtitten by himself) and images. Very well known, his trademark for Lambswool is a paradigmatic example of his approach to sign design. For 26 years he has been art director of “Pubblicità in Italia”, a magazine devoted to Italian advertising and visual design. He wrote many essays on design and arts, and lectured in Europe and Usa.

[The Gestaltung Primacy (nella edizione tedesca della stessa rivista, Das Primat der Gestaltung), in “HQ High Quality” (Heidelberg), 3, 1995, pp. 34-39]

[1995#01] fortuny graphic workshop

During the Fortuny Graphic Workshop in Venice, January 16–21th, there has been a special, open day, when Tibor Kalman, Hamish Muir, and David Carson spoke about their work: a rather unique chance to directly realize their different approaches to creative design, hereafter the strenght of the images they showed to the audience.
The Hungarian–born Kalman, former M&Co design company founder in New York, and now Benetton–sponsored multilingual Colors magazine editor based in Rome, strictly speaking is not a graphic designer: “I’ve never had any talent with my hands—he admits—. I still can’t draw, and I can’t run a computer”—but take care: Walter Gropius too never held a pencil in his life, being anyway one of the greatest architects of XXth Century. Rather, Kalman is a special kind of self–taught, disenchantedly ironic, and provocative question–maker about the borders and the meaning of graphic design in itself: “So much of what you communicate is bullshit. I think designers—he declared— really ought to get involved inside the messages and start to comment on the messages and start to influence the messages.” It clearly emerges that Kalman focal interest is the communication process goal, the content not the container, the message far more than the media: “M&Co has been a 15–year search through all the design media for the Holy Grail,—he said—but it turns out that my Holy Grail was not design, because design is a language, not a message.”
Muir of London 8vo design firm, widely–known for their Octavo sophisticated magazine on typography (8 issues in seven years, the last one as CD–rom), personifies with an amusing touch of self–understatement a different, minimalist, critically cultured trend towards “a new language of synthesis”, after the digital catastrophe that has radically changed the graphic design scene, resulting both in extremely powerful tools and a great ideas poorness, or better: inadequacy. Such a new, contemporary language “must express the spirit of the age and not to be afraid of tomorrow.—following the 8vo philosophy—It must reject letterpress–derived–dead–typography. ‘The new synthesis’ must express the relationship between the meaning and appareance of type and image whilst pushing the frontiers of the latest technology. And it’s not just print–newspapers, books and magazines, it’s everything, from vdus through tv titles to electronic information systems.”
Carson of Carson Design, based in Del Mar (California, Usa: the country where the ‘Graphic Design’ term itself has been minted seventy years ago), a pro surfer with BA Degree in Sociology, is the man behind the Beach Culture and Ray Gun cult–magazines thrilling visual identity, that lead him international acknowledgment and a flood of prizes. Carson says about his innovative ideas on visual design that “the starting point is still the same, which is to interpret”, claiming for an approach that relies upon critical empathy. The intuition strenght and the emotion supremacy that shape his approach are finely tuned with the programmatical transgression, based on abstract rigour and analytic fury, that individualizes his work: his desorder is all but fortuitous, his unreadability a defy to awake our inattentive perception. “Ultimately, one’s influences as a designer—Carson said— must come from within. The strongest, most emotional work springs from utilizing your own unique background, personality and life experience. Who you are as a person should come through in your design work. I try to work intuitively and to provoke an emotional response from the viewer.”