Tankboys

In May of 2007 the Venice Cultural Council asked us to design the printed matter for
“D’estate in Campo”, the calendar of summer events organized by the council. Their purpose was to introduce the venetian summer to the town, a heterogeneous public, with a popular but not obvious language.

This request sonunded like an interesting challenge for us: how to be intellectually elegant and popular at the same time? how to design a message that could be understood by such a heterogeneous public? The answer was to design a pop icon to represent the idea of Summer.
We decided to design a chocolate ice-cream: a symbol of the summer and a metaphor of something greedy to have. An icon that feeds your hunger of entertainment. We spent a lot of time to design the final shape, according to our research with pop icon.

We designed a graphic identity as the mark (that is a simplification of the ice cream) which was distribuited to the events’s organizers, to apply it on each printed matter. For this need we designed a simple manual for the use of the mark by the several graphic designers.
At the same time we designed the official printed matter: a 70×100cm-sized poster, an A3-sized folder and some 50×70cm-sized posters with the events’s calendar divided by category.

© Photos by Giulio Boem

In September of 2007 Teatro Fondamenta Nuove asked us to design the program and the posters for the new season. Starting from the printed matter designed the year before, we decided to redesign the posters’ grid and to change the layout plan, in a way to manage more contents about the shows. We decided on equal colours and to use only the flourescent yellow, used by printers to print town festivals posters (indeed we used to call that coloured paper “town festival paper”). We thought it was interesting to connect such a popular culture with a so experimental and very niche program. A parallel made between their posters and those of the theater, as both are basically typographic based, and printed in black on a fluorescent paper.

The Teater’s program

The programed shows of Teatro Fondamenta Nuove always involve electronical music, experimental music, jazz, dance and contemporary theater and are always on an high level of experimentation and of artistic quality. Therefore they need to be presented with good communication that can explain their aim to the spectator and can catch the attention even if the names of the artists are not so well known. We designed a folder suitable for a big number of contents, including calendar, bands biographies, suggested tracks, websites and general information.

To contain the folder we planned a paper box simply made by a tunnel, without any waste of glue.This packaging was useful also as envelope to send the programs by mail. To keep the coordination also between different support the box should be printed on the same kind of paper (different weight) used for posters. However, because of economical restrictions, the client choose to print them on a white paper with an offset fluorescent colour.
The title, carrying on the previous year slogan, has been written with precious help of the writer Giovanni Montanaro and keep the same irony on the Theater spectators.

Posters

For the new season we decided to redesign the poster’s grid, to increase the difference between the reading levels: we maximized the main information as the date and musicians, and we minimized secondary information, as ticket price, sponsors and telepohone numbers. (Shown here are some pictures of the posters posted on walls). Here two A3-sized posters, for Matmos and The Magic Id.

© Photos by Giulio Boem

At the beginning of the theatrical season of 2006 Teatro Fondamenta Nuove asked us to redesign their corporate identity and to design the next poster campain. The experimental aim of the teater, surely an indication of strong personality, and his minimal architecture made of adobes (here and here are some more images) are very fascinating.

Therefore we drew the guidelines of the corporate identity: we rigorously used only one Type, (Trade Gothic Bold Condensed n. 20, always in capital letters, at different dimensions) and only one color for the print (black, always printed on colored paper).

The logotype comes with a Logotype Gudelines (not yet piblished on this website)

The “Vado a Teatro” Folder
As the first publication of the theater we designed the seasonal program of shows that has to be sent by mail to the spectators. The format and the weight were already fixed (the program has to fit the American envelope, 10 x 21 cm, and weighs less than 20 gr because of postal taxes). We wanted to communicate, without being autocelebrative, the intellectual and social importance of this institution and of its shows. Starting from an A3 format, we elaborated a system of folds to manage different kinds of contents (all the different activities of the theater -Theater, Dance, Music-, all the presences, the planned events, and general information). In collaboration with the young writer Giovanni Montanaro we composed a “tricky sententence”: a title that could change the meaning through the system of folding and which could play with irony of the role of the “intellectual spectator”.

The final result is difficult to translate in english, but it would sound like this:

1. I’m going to the theatre /to show off
2. I’m going to the theatre/to find a way/ to show off
3. I’m going to the theatre/to find a way/to know if life is as they want it to be/to show off

The Teatro Fondamenta Nuove posters
For every concert we had to create 70×100 wall adverts.

We designed a specific grid to manage all the general information about the show, that has to be present in each poster, to host a bigger typographic artwork with the name of the artist/astists, which has to be different in each poster, and to represent a hierarchy between alla contents. Every poster is based on a six column grid that allows us to have a visual uniformity and a peculiar representative artwork at the center.
As Massimo Vignelli says:

“It’s just like in music, where five lines and seven notes allow one to make infinite compositions. That is the magic of the grid.”

A curiosity: In Venice the policy about the Campaign says that a placard should be posted for only two weeks, untill others, wich are on a reservation list, are stuck on top of them. Actually a lot of posters are posted for longer time, so you might easily find an affission about a past event. To avoid this risk of confusion and misunderstanding we choose, with the help of the printer, a low quality, coloured paper. With the help of time and of the exposure to the sun, this paper fades very fast. So you can easily recognize wich poster is new and wich one is old.