Alice Guarnieri

Magazine

Archivio magazine

2020
Art direction studio òbelo
Published by Promemoria Group
archivio.com
Torino / Milano, IT

The fifth, new issue marks a new beginning for Archivio, with a new look, new editorial board, and new format to reflect the change in structure, objective, and perspective. The magazine was created with the objective of expanding the frontiers of content creation from archival resources, building on the idea that the life cycle of archives does not end with their inventory, digitalization, and reorganization, but rather it is at that point that they can take on a new lease of life, becoming something vital, of endless potential.

Exhibition catalogue / Visual identity

PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea

2018
Art direction studio òbelo
Milano, IT

In 2018 with ÷òbelo we have renewed the visual identity of PAC, “the public space for contemporary art in Milan”, by providing the museum with a modular system based on movable layers of text, images and color. Each event is characterized by a distinctive color, running through posters, catalogues, exhibition guides, printed ephemera, museum signage and merchandising.

Poster / Call-to-action

Per poterlo immaginare

2020
signsfor.it
Promotes by h+ w/ Società Umanitaria
Curated by Francesco Dondina
Milano, IT

The Italian illustrators and graphic designers were asked to represent, according to their own free expression, the desired future and the importance of education in order to imagine it. The call to the world of graphic communication started from the call-to-action in favor of Milan, one of the cities most affected by the emergency and has always been the representative of national and international design. The proceeds from the purchases will be donated to the Mission Bambini association, which has supported education for years, through the purchase of the necessary technological material.
The manifesto represents a world that can be imagined thanks to education and the possibility of learning new things by contrasting the digital divide.

Visual identity

Ri.Circola

2020
ricircola.it
Milano, IT

Ri.Circola is a startup that designs methods to make new products starting from waste materials. Similarly, the images used for identity are generated from pre-existing photographs. With Drawbot, an opensource software for producing images, a very simple tool has been created to import a photo from the web and transform it, to create something new. From keywords on Google such as Green / Sustainability / Recycling / Technology / Environmental impact, gradients are obtained directly generated from the original images. The colors are not arbitrary but derive from the original images and always refer to a broader idea of environment, nature, green. The power of this tool is that it allows you to generate a very high number of images that always remain consistent with each other. The result is a nuance that suggests the idea of flow and transformation process from one color to another, in a harmonious way.
The two identity colors complete the graphic elements of the identity and communicate the double soul of the start-up: green for the scientific aspect, which needs precision and clarity; blue to tell the most communicative and emotional aspects.

Silkscreen / Self-initiated

Things I see at home

2020
Sesto San Giovanni, IT

Series of silkscreen prints made during the quarantine with the stencil technique. The subjects are everyday objects and roommates portrayed in a moment of forced quarantine. To avoid any possible waste, each stencil has been designed to be able to print in positive and negative. The prints were made with materials available at that time: a mix of inks and recovery sheets. The sheets of different sizes were then bound into booklets.

Monotype / Self-initiated

Quarantine skies

2020 March
Sesto San Giovanni, IT

During the quarantine, the relation between time and space changed due to the strange situation that forced people to stay at home. Sky saw outside the window of the own room was the most potent contact with the external world. To represent a personal point of view of the sky, a monotype has been printed every day. The ink was based on the weather data: more white in the blue ink to represent less visibility and, more water to represent more humidity.
During the second month of quarantine, the sky was observed with the same intentions of the previous month, this time using a different process. Each day was taken a picture of the sky to visually record the pattern of the clouds, and the gradient of the blue. The pictures collection was reproduced with an ink-jet printer that gives a special grain. Together, each drop of ink composes the sky.

Books / Inkjet prints

Unico nella serie

2019
Coordinator: Silvia Sfligiotti
Advisor: Claude Marzotto Caotorta
Thesis Project at ISIA Urbino, MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

“Unico nella serie. Progettare la casualità nel processo di stampa” investigates the value of errors and unpredictable in the printing process. The thesis starts with the fact that designers nowadays tend to move away from the production step of a graphic artifact. The printing moment is not explored by designers, who entrust their work to the printers. Knowing the printing tools, exploring their limits — even tampering with them — could lead to a rapprochement between designer and printer. The process becomes part of the artifact which is characterized by the qualities of the means of production.
Unico nella serie. User manual — Deskjet 2510 inkjet printer” The purpose of the actions collected in this manual is to understand the printing phase as a design moment. Through 5 actions is possible to tamper with the printer and customize the outputs. The standards that define the print, such as reproduction, resolution and the CMYK colors have been questioned. While the standards are very useful for comparing different outputs and determining characteristics and quality; on the other hand, they limit the particular expressive abilities of the tool. Exploiting the potential of this printer allows us to reproduce a project and above all, to produce at the same printing time, a unique in the series.

Booklets / Maps

Pensieribambini

2019
Art direction ÷òbelo
Within Lacittàintorno, a project by Fondazione Cariplo
Curated by Spaziopensiero
Milano, IT

Lacittàintorno is a cross-sectoral programme for urban regeneration promoted by Fondazione Cariplo in Milan. Within this context, the educational project Pensieribambini engaged about a thousand primary school kids into the exploration and mapping of their own neighbourhoods. We joined the team to design a folding guide series dedicated to Adriano, Corvetto and via Padova districts, aiming to share the project’s findings with a wider audience.

Visual identity

Dialoghi d’Arte(4)

2019
Art direction ÷òbelo
Genova / Noli, IT

For Dialoghi d’Arte(4) festival, focusing on contemporary arts and their audiences, we designed a visual identity based on the encounter between different perspectives. Typography moves on a backdrop where multiple sky views appear as if on a split screen. All the sky images are details from paintings available on Wikimedia Commons.

Magazine

Arcipelago

2018
w/ Vito Battista and Valeria Pugliese
Supervisor: Marco Tortoioli Ricci
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

Arcipelago is a magazine that explores the meaning of nomadism nowadays. In this socio-economic system, we are forced to move continuously. Arcipelago is an ideal community, it explores fictional landscapes starting from real geographical and cartographic elements. Arcipelago shows the identity of this group around the world to which we all belong. We made the images starting from old atlases, touristic guides, and geography newspaper photos. We designed the layout, we produced and edited contents and interviews.

Booklets

Contact

2018
w/ Emma Berthaud, Caterina Birolo and Jacopo Undari
Supervisor: Patrick Lacey and Ben Cain
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

During a one-week-workshop, the team explores the topic of contact through a performance and a publication. Defined a pitch, here the rules of the game: “Have you ever thought about what kind of contact you create with others when you are online? Human contact makes you vulnerable, just as online exposure does. Every encounter leaves a mark on you, whether it's virtual or physical, whether it's bad or good. Consider the people around you as virtual personas. The moment you enter the platform, you are connected to them. Yet, as you will see, they still are intelligent, emotional, sentient human beings that can feel pain and pleasure, that will read your words and will be hurt or cured by them. Enter the platform, connect, leave a comment. Feel free to disconnect whenever you want.”

Photobook

Movement in the terrestrial realm require forces

2018
Supervisor: Mario Cresci
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

The inspiration for this photographic book is “Notebooks Volume 2 The nature of nature” by Paul Klee in which he tells through sketches and exercises the road from nature study to constructive-geometric figuration (from naturalistic or objective representation to geometric interpretation) opens up the range and polarity of the kind of creative thinking that leads to abstraction and its synthesis. Through a photographic exploration of nature, elements have been extrapolated from their context: leaves, branches, flowers. The isolated elements were scanned, photocopied, enlarged and manipulated to explore shapes and geometries. The book ends with a return to nature with a new look, to freely interpret the geometry of natural elements. The photographs on film are manipulated directly in the camera.

Exhibition Catalogue

Io, Luca Vitone

2017
Art direction studio òbelo
Exhibition curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Diego Sileo
Milano, IT

This catalogue was designed for the exhibition “Io, Luca Vitone” held at PAC, the public space for contemporary art in Milan. This tailor-made catalogue shows copies of newspapers’ articles related to the work of the Italian artist, associated with pictures of his work.

Photobook

Fūror

2018
w/ Vito Battista, Nicolò Oriani, Matteo Palù and Valeria Pugliese
Supervisor: Mauro Bubbico
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

Fūror mess up the structures of the museum through subtraction of the elements from their context. Humans being collect and catalog with very precise structures, however, the structures are cultural preconceptions that do not exist in Furor. Knowledge must be non-hierarchical and non-institutional, it is relative. Through the indexing of the photographs taken by Luca Capuano, clear mapping of the provincial museums and their collections is created. At the same time, the fluid structure of the photographic sequence and the absence of categorization makes the book an instrument for the free association of concepts, spaces and times.

Photobook / Visual identity

Les Pommes & Cluster

2017
Photo in the book: Bea De Giacomo
Book design w/ Valeria Pugliese
Supervisor: Francesco Valtolina
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

Les Pommes is one of the thirteen books of Cluster exhibition, designed in collaboration with the photographer Bea De Giacomo. Her delicate portraits and still life compose micro visual narratives, alternating in the chapters of the book.
Cluster is an exhibition of thirteen photographic books made together with thirteen photographers. Cluster means group, together, agglomeration. The aim was to give a harmonious shape to the dissonant ensamble of the works of thirteen very different photographers, but in their own way all extremely contemporary. The result is an exhibition and thirteen books, developed through a fruitful dialogue with the professional photographers. The exhibition took place in the frame of the brutalist architecture of Giancarlo De Carlo, set up for the occasion with book stands made of concrete and a series of photographs printed in monumental format.

Newspaper / Photobook / Visual identity

Collezione 200 & Duecento Primavere

2018
w/ ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing class
Supervisor: Jonathan Pierini
Urbino / Fermignano IT

COLLEZIONE 200 is an exhibition-itinerary created on the occasion of the celebrations for the bicentenary of Fermignano’s independence. Starting from the study of local history and an investigation into the present, six groups of designers, students of ISIA Urbino, bring to the attention of inhabitants and visitors issues related to local identity and living. The project stems from the identification of six fictitious finds from a more or less recent past in Fermignano. Each of them is the starting point for a reflection on places, facts, and people of a local history that opens up to general considerations, whose relevance exceeds the territory.
Duecento Primavere is a spontaneous photographic exploration of the territory that translates into a universe of fragments and details that, often overlooked, could belong to Fermignano like many other places today.

Book

Meme into existence

2017
w/ Giulia Bacchetta Francalanci, Vito Battista and Deepa Parapatt
Supervisor: Silvia Sfligiotti
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

Historically messages of protest against the governments' power were conveyed through posters. Nowadays the tools changed, computers and the internet are the instruments to produce visual subculture. Everyone can make an image and broadcast it through the world. This book starts from a brief historical excursus of protest and revolution movements, to talk about the images of the counterculture that is spreading over the world in these years: the meme. As an ephemeral fragment of contemporary culture, the meme tends to be a mirror of the society in which it is born and responds to the demand for ease of fruition and intelligibility, a one-shot image that immediately communicates his meaning.

Booklets

Performing lines

2017
w/ ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing class
Workshop designed by studio òbelo
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT

Before any drawing or writing there is an advancing line. Each line carries with it an intention — research, tone, relationship —, like a potential destiny to be developed along one's path. Many artists have confronted the line to grasp its motive and its secret qualities. Their interpretations tell of different characters, all of them describe an experience of movement: the line is always a way of acting on the page and in space. Marcel Duchamp finds access to the fourth dimension in the curves of a line-phenomenon; Adrian Frutiger models a closed line, a mobile contour of form and counterform; for Paul Klee the line is the active impulse of a point, the principle of construction and relation; Henri Michaux explores a wandering, sleepwalking, introspective or lysergic line; Saul Steinberg's lines interpret the lives and voices of human types as a diagram.
During the Performing Lines workshop the lines of these authors were studied with the aim of translating them into a series of performative actions that allow, through an experience of movement in space, to appropriate the ‘movement principle’ of each one. The actions will be designed ad hoc for the internal and external spaces of the former Monastery of Santa Chiara.

Booklets

Performing lines

2017
Cards realized for the initiative ISIA Urbino Xmas cards
Urbino, IT

The red circle and the green triangle synthesize the typical shapes and colors of Christmas. Printing errors make each postcard unique and leave traces of the process. The shapes were printed with the stencil technique, using a screen printing frame, and two alternating colors. Circle and triangle, positive and negative, green and red have been combined to obtain always different configurations in the white space.

Book

Pirelli, la rivista

2017
w/ Giulia Lantier and Flavia Lunardi
Supervisor: Leonardo Sonnoli and Irene Bacchi
ISIA MA Communication and Design for Publishing
Urbino, IT
→ Featured in ADI Design Index 2018, Targa giovani

In-house literature products created by companies are often considered “grey literature” as they are not published through normal publishing channels, but distributed by the organization that produces them. These include the Pirelli magazine, published between 1948 and 1972 and created by designers, graphic designers, illustrators and prominent personalities of the time.
This piece of research investigated the first American cases of technical business magazines (which have acted as an example for the creation of similar magazines in Italy), then turned to the Italian historical and social context of the time, Milan in particular. An important part of the work was dedicated to an analysis of individual Pirelli editions. Elements such as publication frequency, publishers, authors, photographers and types of covers, art directors and the comparison with “Civiltà delle Macchine” have been analyzed and narrated through specially developed graphics.

Prints

Paper marbling

2016 — 2018
Print Preview VII: EBRU
Workshop organised by Clàudia Queirós
Porto, PT / Milano, IT

Paper marbling is a method of aqueous surface design, which can produce patterns similar to smooth marble or other kinds of stone. Each print is a unique monotype. Different patterns were printed during the workshop, each one corresponds to a very precise set of rules.
The second edition of paper marbling was made with expired ink. The result is that the margins of the ink are broken into contact with the water. Small parts and drops of ink draw dashed shapes on the paper.