Interview with Emanuele Bonetti

Please, introduce briefly yourself and your projects.

I’m Emanuele and I’m a graphic designer. After my degree in Visual Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano I moved to Oslo first and then to London to work as a graphic designer and I eventually ended up in Rotterdam where I just took my Master Degree in Networked Media at the Piet Zwart Institute. This last experience has been something that really changed my approach to graphic design. After years of working with traditional methods I’m now more into find alternative ways to face this profession. With parcodiyellowstone, the design collective I started few years ago together with Loredana Bontempi, we are trying to push graphic design into a different dimension. We are constantly looking for different approaches, combining our passion for graphic design with open source culture, new media and design ethics.

Peer-to-peer design strategies from parcodiyellowstone on Vimeo.

How did you get to P2P design strategy?

Peer-to-peer design strategies started as my graduation project at Piet Zwart Institute. It came as a natural consequence of our practice as parcodiyellowstone. After few months of work with my colleague we took a moment to look back to our production and we just realized the projects we developed entirely together where the ones we liked the best. Working as peers on every single aspects, looking for a solution that would have equally satisfied both of us, gave us the chance to explore direction we would have never thought individually.

After getting closer to the open source philosophy used in software development I was curious to see if such methods would have worked the same in a professional graphic design context. To do that I’ve been researching in as many collaborative methods as possible, in all kind of different fields. I’ve tried to see if and how these methodologies could have been re-adapted to graphic design. These methodologies have been then tested in a series of workshop addressed to graphic designer in order to figure out what would actually make sense or not. These workshops were a sort of playground to experiment alternative methods in real life scenarios. I admit was quite tricky at the beginning to find a right format to let designers work at their best. But after few experiments I think we now have a format that really allow designers to play around and really work together.

Why it is so special? What are the advantages of P2P in design?

As I started mentioning before the biggest advantage of such an approach is that looking for a solution that satisfies everyone in the group is a good way to explore unexpected directions. Lot of people think that working together always ends up with a compromise. As we all probably know a compromise is never a good way to communicate an idea. These methodologies in fact have been developed to avoid this issue, in order to give graphic designers a structure to maximize the effect of their collaboration. If instead of looking for a compromise we really start building on top of each other ideas we could really have a final solution that is the result of everyone in the group. I like to think that graphic design is not about communicating a personal interpretation, but about finding every time the most effective way to communicate an idea. Lot of people working individually, as well as a lot of graphic design studio working in a hierarchical structure, tent to get stuck within a certain style. Communicating different ideas always in the same way at the end always communicate the same thing, which is simply wrong in a field such as graphic design. Finding a way to have a real consensus based decision has been the most difficult part of the project. All the methods I initially took as examples always ended up with a certain kind of center of control, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Most of the workshops we’ve where centered on this issue: find a way to have a real consensus based decision. Lot of things still need to be improved but I think we got some interesting results.

What do you enjoy most on your job?

The best way we found to enjoy this job is to approach every project from scratch. Doesn’t matter if it’s just a postcard or a crazy plan to destabilize the italian government (yes, we’ve done also that ; ). The most important thing is to have fun while you are doing it. And the best way we found to have fun is to try every time something new, mixing old and new media, using different techniques and eventually defining new visual languages. We like to see our job as a game, and that’s also the reason why I don’t like to play alone. I really enjoy working with people, people can be really amazing and you never know what to expect from them. About a year ago we had the chance to go to Milan to give a workshop in the art academy there. Students there were incredibly inspiring and after few hours the differences in between teachers and students were completely gone and I bet we learnt more from them then what we taught.

Do you have any example, somebone who is worth following?

Definitely worth to check Loredana’s project ddump. She’s been researching on digital waste and on how digital recycling could help graphic designers communicating our society and change the traditional aesthetic. She got some crazy results that you must see at http://digitaldump.co.cc/.

Then you should also check the Networked Media course at Piet Zwart Institute, in Rotterdam [http://pzwart.wdka.nl/networked-media/]. It’s a small group of students and teachers and everyone in there is extremely talented and nice. It’s a crazy place and a pretty unique school in the world. A special mention to Aymeric Mansoux, core-tutor and co-supervisor at the institute, co-founder of goto10 and one of the best artist I’ve ever met. I don’t think we have enough space here to talk about him so you better check it out on you own at http://su.kuri.mu/.

During the last year we also had the honor and the pleasure to work with Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini aka Les Liens Invisibles [http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org/]. Those guys are  amazing. We did the graphic design for one of their last projects called Seppukoo [http://www.seppukoo.com/] and they are not only brilliant but also contagiously passionate about what they do.

Since you have been at the LGM in Brussels you do know OSP [http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/], a really interesting case of completely open source graphic design. Definitely worth to check Luciano Perondi and his projects Molotro [http://www.molotro.com/] and Exp [http://www.progetto-exp.org/]. He is a great type designer with an incredibly innovative approach.

Then, of course, don’t forget to visit us at parcodiyellowstone.it, we have some nice plans for the future.

Do you use photos for your work?

Yes, we do use photos. When possible we like to take our own pictures for our projects, especially because most of the time we take pictures of things we do, collages or typography done with real objects. Unfortunately in some cases we don’t have the time or the equipments to take the pictures we would need and that’s the case when we use pictures from stock libraries. What I find particularly annoying are graphic designers who use the first result of google images. It’s annoying when you start seeing the same pictures used for tons of different projects. I find it kind of sad and also not fair for the clients who get low quality products both on a conceptual and on a technical level.

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