Last month, Ben Terrett of The Design Conspiracy posted a piece about the Annual. When we read that some of his readers were interested in a bit more detail about it, we thought it would be nice to ask Ben to interview one of the Fabrica team who designed this year's Annual, in a designer-to-designer sort of way.
Happily both parties agreed, so armed with a list of questions, including some from his blog's readers, Ben had a chat with Omar Vulpinari, Head of Visual Communication at Fabrica (Benetton's research centre on communication).
Ben: How the hell do you get a job like this? Did you pitch for it? Are you
friends with Tony Davidson?
Omar: Our reputation simply matched D&AD's strategy for 2007 - the brief's
keywords: international, multicultural, multidisciplinary, and the conscious
decision to assign the commission to a non-British design team mainly
steered it towards Fabrica.
And of course later we became great friends with Tony, Paula, Holly and
many others. Its impossible not to with such empowering partners and lovely
people.
B: Do you get paid for it?
O: I really hope...
B: Did the history of the book or the creative nature of the past designs
affect your perception as to how safe or experimental you should make it?
O: Not really, but of course history of context is fundamental and this annual
has an overwhelming history of quality to compare with. We cherish more an
approach based on individual history reacting to present society.
B: Were you given a production budget to work with, or did it depend on your
concept?
O: We received flexible and thoughtful parameters that effectively stimulated
our creativity.
B: How long did it take? How far in advance do you get briefed?
O: Fortunately it came in almost a year in advance.
B: It's the same content every year and it's the same shape and size, does
that make it easy to design?
O: It definitely allows to concentrate more on the two-dimensional design and
on the communication side.
B: Do you use the same grid as previous years, or do you invent a new one?
O: New one.
B: It must take a while to artwork, print & deliver after winners/nominees
have been decided but before they are announced, are you sworn to secrecy?
O: Certainly.
B: Are you proud of it?
O: Extremely. Getting the international creative community to contribute [to the Flag Project] with
so much enthusiasm and quality is alone a great result. A collective result
that we only sparked. It was great for me at the presentation in London to
meet some of the contributors and feel their pride also in being such an
important part of the project.
B: Apart from yours, which is your favourite annual?
O: Impossible to answer directly to this one, because they've all been
designed with passion, personality and context consideration. They're all
children of one happy family.
With many thanks to both Ben and Omar.
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