The Annual Report 2022 for the Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA) was designed by Intorno Design (Guido Lombardo, Francesco Paolo Incantalupo, Davide Luccini).

The volume, which contains the narrative and cataloging of the best projects and activities carried out in 2022 at the Rome University of Fine Arts, is presented as a black-edged painted block decorated on the cover with silver signs and symbols taken from details of the inner pages (images, typefaces, pictorial lines of the illustrations and data visualizations).

The content is told from an analytical perspective where photography, illustration, and typography become tools of investigation rather than narrative, of exploration rather than discovery. The layout and typesetting, characterized by the choice of a single typeface, Tipiblu's Sempione Grotesk for CAST, take their inspiration from the graphic layout of medical x-rays. The photographic project presents some of the daily protagonists of the classes and internal offices in a taxonomic way by the use of synecdoche. The 4-color illustrations and monochrome infographics alternate between the storytelling of qualitative data according to a human-centered approach and the rational visualization of quantitative data. The alternation of different media of representation, stabilized by a selective choice of colors and typographic elements, encourages a slow and thoughtful reading of the complexity of contemporaneity, within the academic and artistic context.

The logo uses Swordfish with its alternate script capitals.

Aaltoo Festival is a three-day international event about graphic design, illustration, comics, photography, and self-publishing. The festival is organized by Aaltoo ASP in Cupramontana (AN), Italy. It takes place in the local theater – recently renovated – and offers a wide range of activities like workshops, talks, concerts, exhibitions, wall painting performances, and a market area.

For the visual identity of the third edition, I (Marco Goran Romano) worked as an art director and event curator, and decided to work almost exclusively with typography, thus creating a versatile identity system capable of adapting to multiple applications. To achieve this, I combined two fonts that seem difficult to pair: Swordfish and Sempione Grotesk, both from Cast Type Foundry.

Swordfish is an all-caps geometric sans inspired by the 1920s and 30s avant-garde typefaces and jazz record covers of the 1940–50s; Sempione, instead, is a spanking sans serif family suitable for publishing and advertising that looks great in small and large sizes. Together, they create an interesting contrast that fits perfectly with Aaltoo Festival’s core values of inclusivity and open-mindedness.

Logotype development

Ar/Ge Kunst is a research and production space for the arts in Bolzano.

The name Ar/Ge Kunst is an abbreviation of the German word Arbeitsgemeinschaft (working group), which was chosen to promote the idea of collective work, and also has the meaning to unsettle (coming from the German word arge).

The Kunstverein aims to reinforce the collective aspect inherent in the name Ar/Ge Kunst as a research and production space for the arts, in which every new production forges a new working group of practitioners from different walks of life, to think through impending social, legal and artistic questions.

The entire identity is based on a very strict grid system: three rows, three languages, three headings, three columns across every media and every format.

Cover

Elogio del margine / Scrivere al buio (“Praise of the margin / Writing in the dark”) by bell hooks and Maria Nadotti is a publication by Tamu Edizioni.

In the essays “Elogio del margine”, bell hooks shows us “choices and places” where the resistance to the oppression of African American women took place in view of a liberation that involves everyone, women and men.

In “Scrivere al buio”, a critical and at the same time intimate dialogue with Maria Nadotti, the key themes of the thought of bell hooks, including the contestation of that white feminism that by representing women as a single “caste” denies the differences between women themselves, are tested on ordinary topics: family and couple relationships, education, the use of money, the practice of writing. Feminist thought arises from the personal experience of oppression and must therefore speak to women of less well-off status, not close in a language for the few that allows the maintenance of the status quo.

Flyleaf

Frontespiece

Internal pages

Back cover

The cover provides a table of contents, with an outlined letter a from each of the 16 featured typefaces.

CAST Foundry loves to spread the typographic word. This is why we have partnered with the independent Italian publishing house Lazy Dog Press to produce Cast It, a periodical publication that discusses the history and culture of type together with CAST’s digital fonts. Half magazine, half specimen.

Cast It #3, “Der Schriftgiesser” (“The typefounder”, by Johann Samuel Halle) is a description of typefounding included in Werkstäte der heutigen Künste oder die neue Kunsthistorie – a virtually encyclopedic series concerning crafts originally published in Leipzig between 1761 and 1779.

Thanks to Dan Reynolds, we now have Halle’s text for the first time in English. His translation comes with a foreword (also by Reynolds) which is also the only commentary on its contents ever published in any language.

The fonts used for the title page are, from top to bottom: Macho Modular, Rialto dF (“An Essay”), Voland Italic, Sempione Grotesk (“Typefounding”), Capraia Italic, Sole Sans, Saffran (“Werkstäte …”), Dic Sans, Valnera Italic (“Werkstäte”), Neon Nbl, Arzachel Italic, Voland (“Dan Reynolds”), Valnera Italic, Macho Moustache, and Rialto dF.

The opening page of the essay is set in Valnera Monster and a type weight gradient from Arkit.

Spread with Zenon, Gramma (left), and various styles from Neon Nbl (right).

Spread with cross-page text set in Macho Moustache.

Detail.

Sempione Grotesk and Sempione Modern.

English translation with two-column text set in Capraia, Gramma, Rialto dF, Divenire, Fulmar, and Arkit.

The photographs showed in the exhibition Guido Guidi. In Veneto, andata e ritorno (“In Veneto, home and return”), taken between the 1980s and 1990s, refer to the explorations conducted by the author in Veneto (Italy), the region to which he moved first for study and then for work, and in Cesena, the city where he lives.

Damiano Fraccaro designed a simple yet powerful visual identity of the event using exclusively Sempione Grotesk.

Designed for a small exhibition, this catalogue shows artworks by Titina Maselli, an Italian artist who moved her style crossing movements and currents, never turning into abstract, learning from abstraction the power of colours and composition. An abstract sculpture by Flavio Favelli completes the exhibition. The catalogue shows a simple layout in order to enhance the strong impact that artworks have on the page.

Catalogue designed for the annual meeting of Letterpress Workers (LPW19) in Leoncavallo Spa (Milan), 26–29 June 2019.

All text uses Sempione Grotesk by Tipiblu × Cast, paired with a selection of big wood type used as a pattern of glyphs, and as poster inserts. As for now, the correct names of the wood type remain unknown.

Art direction: Claudio Madella
Graphic design: Fabrizio Falcone, Fabrizio Radaelli
Photos: Armina Ghazaryan
Offset printing: GVD Gutenberg Druckerei und Verlag, Leipzig
Letterpress printing: carpe plumbum, Leipzig

Artworks designed by the participants of LPW19

Artworks designed by the participants of LPW19