Recently Gasworks asked us to design the identity and the printed communication of Disclosures, a seminar and series of events around the notion of openness in art, design, culture…

Disclosures * is a series of events organised by the London gallery Gasworks - Disclosures seeks to scrutinise the notion of openness across fields of cultural production at large. A first reading of openness refers to situations in which the viewer, reader, listener or internet user becomes emancipated through egalitarian participation, collaborative authorship and/or the breaking down of hierarchical and social boundaries.
Gasworks asked us to design the identity of the event, as well as identify some topics or element of some relevance for the discussions. We designed the program as a leaflet which one have to unfold and refold to completely browse. It is using a die-cut and folding system which during the process of unfolding/refolding reveal the internal logic of its binding; a couple of bugs and hack have been disseminated inside it; the overall design is mimicking traditional book layout, with large margins and flowing notes, and at the same time this layout is twisted through repetitions of grid and spacing; the identity is based on the font LaPolice edited by B&P Type Foundry ** - this typeface is known as the first hack in the history of typography:

The text has been set in LaPolice – a character cut by Mathieu Malherbe Des Portes in 1705 and digititalised by François Rappo in 2007. LaPolice is edited and distributed by BP Foundry; this character is described as being the first hack in typography: it is the almost immediate copy of Le Romain du Roi, a typeface designed specifically as an authenticity certification for the King of France’s printed documents; it incorporates the x-height serifed l , the historical mark of typefaces from l’Imprimerie Nationale, Paris.

* Disclosures on the Gasworks website
** B&P Type Foundry
*** here is a (non official) release of the pdf:
Disclosures program - Downloadable PDF

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under designing, electronest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.