JEKYLL & HYDE ― TRANSCRIPT
Surely we look at the history of Italian and also international design as something fascinating and as a source of inspiration. For example I met Bruno Munari’s work at an exhibition in 1985 at Palazzo Reale in Milan.
By the end of the exhibition I was the happiest person in the world and I started to get passionate, reading his books and being interested in his work. It is definitely something that, even unintentionally, influences us.
I had a meeting at the Polytechnic University of Milan and I was still a student at Brera Academy. Bob Noorda was there to introduce his work in person. I could never think that all these different brands had been made by the same person, it is a thing that today I still consider extraordinary.
I'm Marco and this is Margherita, our agency name is Jekyll & Hyde, we founded it in 1996. So we've been working in this field for more than twenty years and we mainly work with graphic design and visual communication, brand identity, type design, publishing.
Working in this field requires both aspects, you cannot be just creative or just technical so with this name we wanted to play around this concept.
In this case we were invited together with other graphic design Swiss agencies to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the union between Swiss and Italian graphic design, so 75 years since the date of this publication. Rather than celebrate in a way that is dusty and predictable, to create a monument to this past era,
We preferred to focus on what their experience might have been, something we are very envious of. These two different realities had met many years ago and had all these possibilities to develop new languages, new styles, on very important projects and so we tried to recreate the theme of the collaboration. Just as they collaborated in a way, today we try to collaborate too. Let’s see what happens. Everything was focused on this kind of process.
We worked on the differences, analyzing the different words in times and modalities and rules we had previously agreed upon, each one of us had a set time to perform an operation and then pass the project back to the other agency that would overturn the work by deleting and interacting with the poster. At the end, the poster was the result of this performance.
Several illustrators, designers, photographers are invited and each one of them produces a different sixteenth, there are six editions in a year, we have been invited by the Italian publisher Corraini and we have awaited our twenty years anniversary,
So to have a kind of a special occasion. It’s one of the few projects where actually there are basically no boundaries, we can do whatever we want because it’s a project for ourselves. It’s the simplest thing and the hardest at once.
So the theme we decided to develop was "the future". We picked 7 correct predictions and 7 wrong. Unquestionably wrong. And we put them together in the same double pages.
For example, these are two predictions: one is Einstein’s reporting that mankind would never be able to split the atom and on the other side there is a science fiction writer who, many years ago used the term "atomic bomb" before it was even invented.
In reality, there are still constraints here… they are not the same limitations a client can give but we set them for ourselves. One was to use only typography and therefore what we were going to create was not supposed to have any images. Another was to use only a subset of colors and therefore we had only a few colors to work with.
We imagined these double pages from a different perspective with a 90 degree rotation thinking of them as posters, as small posters. So all the others sixteenth have a classic setup, while we turned it around.
For example, these are two predictions: one is Einstein’s reporting that mankind would never be able to split the atom and on the other side there is a science fiction writer who, many years ago used the term “atomic bomb" before it was even invented.
Once again, what is design, and here again I refer to Bruno Munari quoting another Easter proverb "what is right is beautiful."
What we think design is, is a response to a problem, is finding something extremely distinctive for a client that is a solution to their needs. Surely design is communication so it must relay a message: you must remember that you have a message.
Perhaps the interpretation that we have found, is to involve the person who sees this message, this communication, to have them interact as much as possible and feel moved. So they become caring and an energy is created, an energy that is more than just simple information. A passive reading.