11/2008Creative bureaucatalogue, editorial

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Italian logos – stories in the art of excelling is a complex and extensive exhibition, held in the prestigious seat of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome; it is about the history of the most important Italian firms and their relationships with the culture, the art and the world of Design.
Born Under the patronage of the President of the Republic, it has been sponsored by the most important Ministries and Government agencies as well as numerous cultural and enterprise museums; we have been commissioned this important project by the creators of the exhibition, Innovarte Srl.

To exploit and to disseminate the immense wealth of stories told in the exhibition it is the aim we kept in mind while designing the catalogue. Starting from the work done for the visual identity, we built the layout and the grid system that respond to the need of rationalizing thousands of historical images and dozens of long contributions of text; we did this without dispersing the single value but rather to facilitate the research, the organization and reading. We added the design and the use of an isometric grid to our visual system as we will do in the progress chart; this grid reproduces the ‘cubic’ structure that architects have used to design the physical layout of the objects on display.
The long and carthusian work of designing the layout and proofreading each page will lead to a catalogue of nearly 500 pages to be considered in all of his aspects as a manual about visual excellence in Italy.

At the same time, we are designing a smart version of the catalogue, which will have an easy and cost effective distribution, in order to allow all visitors to bring home a memory about those companies that have made the history of Italian excellence. The challenge is to design a smart catalogue, which on one hand won’t be experienced as a reduction (adaptation?) of the catalogue itself, but  instead as an independent and complementary object; and on the other it will contain the values of the project, of the elegance and the quality with which we have designed the all the rest.
The result is an elegant packaging, designed ad hòc, which collects 48 cards with significant pictures of the exhibition and its visual system; the way this has been designed and cost optimized will allow the catalogue to be sold at a modest price and will represent an excellent value for money.

Related Projects:
Logo and image
Progress chart

Some pages

Smart catalogue, collection of postcards with packaging