Design as a Language Without Words the G-2

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English editionFirst published in 2011 by

BergEditorial offices:

4951 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP, UK175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

Grace Lees-Maffei 2011

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form

or by any means without the written permission ofBerg.

Berg is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84788 956 0 (Cloth)978 1 84788 955 3 (Paper)

e-ISBN 978 1 84788 957 7 (individual)

Typeset by xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group

www.bergpublishers.com

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Practice and the verbalization of design are intimately connected. Designers write to pres-

ent and pitch their work, quote their influences, describe their methods and formulate

their views on design history and theory. Against this landscape, the Italian designer A G

Fronzoni1represents a remarkable exception: despite having started his career as a journal-ist and worked for many years as a design educator, he only produced a handful of writ-

ings, mostly refusing to dedicate himself to this form of creation. If we consider design

itself as a text, nonetheless, we can read in his work the use of several very subtle linguistic

strategies. His work is considered a prime example of a design language based on simplic-

ity and reduction to the basic elements and therefore a faithful continuation of the values

traditionally associated with modern design. However, a close reading of his work uncovers

a different understanding of design, which is read as a means to convey messages without

hermeneutic mediation, as an attempt to picture the world and show rather than tell.2

In 1997, the designer and design writer Giorgio Camuff

o set out to survey the state ofgraphic design in Italy in a book featuring a selection of recent and classic works produced

in the country. He invited some of Italys recognized masters to contribute short essays to

the project.3Amongst them was A G Fronzoni, who was known as the most Swiss of Ital-

ian graphic designers because of his modernist rigour,4as well as the initiator of minimal-

ism in Italy,5and a designer who used only two colours, black and white, both in his work

and his personal life. Fronzonis submission apparently resembled a page of Leonardos

journals: forty-two lines of mirror-image-looking text, white on black (Fig. 14.1). Never-

theless, the page, printed in tiny Futura typeface, revealed itself, on closer inspection, not

to be an enlightening passage on typography or design ethics, and therefore nothing like

the other essays written for the book. Te words are apparently random juxtapositions ofconsonants and vowels. In its simple construction, the text is legible yet unreadable. Only

the title actually makes sense, and even in reverse it clearly reads, in Italian: Che vergogna

scrivere, which translates as What a shame, or How embarrassing it is to write.

Fronzonis page, particularly in the context of the design anthology for which it was

conceived, was not simply a witty joke. It encapsulated the principles that consistently

characterized the work of this designer. His case is quite uncommon in the landscape

of early contemporary design. Unlike many of his colleagues, for whom writing was a

central part of the work of a design professional, Fronzoni almost systematically avoided

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it. Fronzoni questions and reassesses the role of writing in European culture, replete with

documents and archives, within which the written word is crucial. In Fronzonis posters,

and in the books and magazines he laid out, text is used very sparsely; often characters

are exaggeratedly small and demand that the viewer makes an effort to come closer to the

two-dimensional surface. Words are disassembled, sliced, hidden in the folds of the lay-

out. Tey lose centrality and are pushed to the margins of the frame, to the point where

their very readability is jeopardized. However, the designer and his collaborators were

always careful to avoid overlapping messages and elements; therefore the end result remains

legible and clear.

Born in Pistoia, Tuscany, Fronzoni (19232002) started his career as typographer, jour-

nalist and exhibition designer in the Lombard city of Brescia in the years immediately after

the Second World War, before moving to Milan, where he opened an office with life-long

collaborator Myrna Cohen.Te first two decades after the Second World War were marked

by an ideological approach to culture in Europe, and particularly Italy, where the major-

ity of the intellectuals, and most architects and designers, were informed by the ideas of

the modern movement, and openly supported those political forces interested in a radi-

cal renewal of society. Modernist ideas, such as those of Le Corbusier and of the Dessau

Bauhaus, were attractive to governments that believed design (messages, objects, buildings,

Fig. 14.1 A G Fronzoni, Che vergogna scrivere(1997). Photo: Giorgio Camuffo.

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Design as a Language Without Words the G-2