By developing strategy, design, software and content, we generate exciting relationships between brands and people.

From Illustration to Comics. Pencils in Talented Young Hands / Frankfurter Buchmesse / 2024

A magazine in the shape of an exhibition catalogue or an exhibition catalogue in the shape of a magazine? We like hybrids, middle ways, diagonals. So we put 30 authors and one master on the pages (and walls) of the Frankfurt Book Fair. An aniconic (or hypericonic) cover with four signs for the four areas in which the 30 talented young hands were selected and grouped by Ivan Canu, Grazia Gotti and Silvana Sola.

Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Bologna Book Plus, Bologna Fiere, AIE.
Roots in the Future – Italy Guest of Honour 2024 Frankfurter Buchmesse.

How do blind people study the moon's orbit?

November 28, 2024, 1:00 pm. At Handimatica 2024 we will present Tiresia, an accessible education app dedicated to blind and visually impaired students. Tiresia allows you to build and explore digital tactile figures by taking advantage of vibrations, sounds and speech synthesis, on smartphones and tablets. Geometric figures, function curves, maps of buildings, and conceptual maps can also be used visually, thus creating interaction in studying between sighted and blind people.
Tiresia is a project developed by Nicolò Carpignoli (Chialab) as part of a PhD carried out in collaboration with the IUAV of Venice.

November 28, 2024, 1:00 p.m.
Nicolò Carpignoli / TIRESIA
Handimatica edition 2024 / Innovators of Accessibility: the projects selected by the Call4Projects 
Aldini Valeriani Institute
Via Bassanelli, 9/11, Bologna

Bologna Book Fairs

Using the plural is mandatory for the multitude of symbols, icons, brands, illustrations, colors, letters which we design to accompany Bologna’s passion for publishing: Bologna Children's Book Fair, BBPlus, Bologna Licensing Trade Fair/Kids, Bologna Frankfurt, Bologna Shanghai, Bologna Guadalajara, Bologna Angoulême, Bologna Bangkok, Bologna Grand Tour, Illustrators Exhibition, Comics Corner, Self publishing, Awards, Illustrators Survival Corner, BCBF Galleries… 

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Reading is a common good

For the Egyptian Museum in Turin and with the Paideia Foundation, we faced the challenge of telling people with special communication needs about the life of the ancient Egyptians. Design obstructions: both individual and group use, print and digital dissemination, self-consistent and cross-reference-free utilization. In page layout, we kept the linearity of the story firm: no menus, no links; only two compositional schemes in the text-image relationship, a minimized number of visual codes for illustrations and typographic styles.

Here the thematic paths “Reading is a common Good”
Deir el-Medina, Il Viaggio dei morti, Il dono del Nilo

Museo Egizio di Torino, Fondazione Paideia.

BCBF24 workshop with Bruno de Almeida

For the 2025 edition of Bologna Children’s Book Fair we teamed up with Bruno de Almeida. The annual VIW (Visual Identity Workshop) took place in June at our place. Many ideas appeared on the table while we met in Bologna, intense discussions went on for the rest of the summer involving everyone on the team. See you in Bologna for the 62^nd edition of BCBF, 31 March – 3 April 2025.

See also

Bologna Children’s Book Fair

Titillium Serif PRO: first studies

We have released the first studies of the “version_00” of Titillium Serif PRO that follow the sans version in design, vertical proportions and overall dimensions.

The intention is to develop in parallel also a second version in discontinuity with the sans and with features closer to the historical serif canons. We thus trace a double design path with the aim of meeting different editorial needs, without ever losing the identity of the Titillium family and its vertical metrics.

At the moment settle for the sans continuity version. Download it, explore it, and do not demand perfection: still a long way to go and that is precisely why your every observation will be valuable. Thank you!

Download: “Titillium Serif PRO_00” from Chialab GitHub

For reports please write to: titillium@chialab.it

The Tititillium Serif PRO project is part of our Titillium curation efforts and is based on Lorenzo Volpe's thesis, “TITILLIUM SERIF. Research and Typographic Practice,” discussed at ISIA Faenza and supervised by Antonio D'Elisiis.

L’Albertazzi è accademico

A ottobre 2023 è uscito L’Albertazzi, dizionario illustrato di slang urbano bolognese. È stato incubato e progettato da noi, scritto da Francesco Perlini, illustrato da Valeria Cavallone e Lufo.

Il successo di questo piccolo dizionario ha incuriosito Alberto Ghia, un ricercatore di Linguistica dell’Università di Torino che ci ha regalato una lunga recensione sulla rivista accademica di Lingue e Letterature Moderne “Ricognizioni”.

Tra le righe dell’articolo si può assaporare l’analisi dell’opera più completa e puntuale che fino ad ora abbiamo avuto il piacere di leggere. Se foste curiosi, si trova qui!

See also

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Here comes Albertazzi

(Luca Longi) Lufo

Methods and affordance

We have two obsessions: making team design of visual artifacts efficient and designing accessible interfaces. These are issues that we deal with in our daily practice and that we have deepened with two industrial Phd papers with the IUAV of Venice. They feature Manuel Zanettin and Nicolò Carpignoli. Manuel analyzed different project management methods to create a new application of the method for communication design while Nicolò designed and prototyped a system to make blind people perceive lines and curves by touch.

Read the research papers:

Managing design projects with Agile methods

Getting blind people to perceive lines of function and geometric shapes by touch and hearing

Industrial Phd Thesis Discussions.
Manuel Zanettin, Application of Scrum in communication design.
Nicolò Carpignoli, Curved line recognition with speech synthesis for vibrotactile graphics on general-purpose touchscreen devices.
Speaker: Prof. Luciano Perondi.
Chialab, Iuav University of Venice, Course in Architecture, City and Design.
Design Science.
May 13, 2024, IUAV Venice, Badoer,
Classroom G, 10:30 a.m.

Titillium PRO

We released under the Open Font License (OFL) an expanded version of Titillium. We did this after years of frequent use collecting desires and critical issues. We did it with the consent of the Urbino Academy of Arts, Marcello Signorile and Luciano Perondi who designed and developed it with students in their courses. We called it Titillium PRO and soon we expect to release, again under OFL license, the serif version!

Download Titillium PRO sans from Chialab GitHub.

Here some more details about the process and features of Titillium PRO.

For reports please write to titillium@chialab.it