Блоги: заметки с тегом national symbols

The Journey into Color

Robert — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:36:17 +0500

The Giracolore is a spin-art machine pertaining to the new popular tradition of Italian toys:

Raffaele Cesano, the Giracolore’s creator, asked me to make a book with its history and practical uses.

“The Journey into Color” (Il viaggio nel colore) is now the first book I have fully designed, and perhaps even my biggest design work yet. Its copies now come with every device put on sale.

The client

Raffaele is a schoolteacher-turned-toymaker. He’s especially good at crafting traditional toys and games, like spinning tops, smol carousels, and wooden acrobats. He is fascinated with color in motion.

Process

Raffaele first gave me a bunch of material: pictures, informational texts, and stories. Some things would be repeated across four different texts, but each one would have something useful of its own. I read them all and then wove them into a fluent narrative. Every now and then, I would meet Raffaele to refine the text together. I also took some disc pics myself.

I learned a lot about book design while working on this. For example:

The placement of punctuation and line breaks affects legibility. A line break at the wrong syllable can make a word appear to be a different one.
Consistency in punctuation colors and weights is a science of its own!

Outcome

I chose a 13×18 cm format for the book so it would fit perfectly into the Giracolore’s 13.5×19 cm box. Nothing is arbitrary here: the disc on the cover is the size of a real one. I made sure each spread had at least some color.

The imprint page and its adjacent table of contents are stunning: the gradient title, the rare NB ligature, the Italian cockade (which looks like a Giracolore disc!), the frame…

The book begins with a short introduction to the Giracolore and proceeds with spin-art’s history. Notice the alignment of the words “bellezza” on the left page:

The book then delves into color psychology:

And culminates with stories metaphorically illustrated with the Giracolore. Here’s one of them, The Little Blonde Girl, with the parallelism principle at work:

Some pages encourage to make one’s own disc and glue it in:

The book ends with an invitation to take a look at Raffaele’s other projects and to contact him:

The book is set in three styles of Apfel Grotesk: Regular, Fett, and Brukt (for the “stick your disc here” label).

Conclusion

The book is the best introduction to the Giracolore, vividly showing the device’s value for children, teachers, artists, storytellers, and therapists.

Good design is never boring.

The client’s review

Robert has visually arranged The Journey into Color with great success and has helped me introduce it to the public.

Robert has various qualities: his youthful energy gave me confidence to express what I felt. I had fun letting him do his thing, letting him express and interpret my ideas. Everyone has the right to play the game they enjoy the most.

The result is what I wanted.

I initially hesitated to pay in advance, but during the course of the work, I saw Robert’s reliability firsthand.

Enjoy the colors!

London in May 2023

Robert — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 03:49:25 +0500

Robert:

First of all, the euphoric smell is still there. I didn’t find it as common as in 2020 and before, but it does come from the Tube and it also came from a bus. May it stay.

A beautiful window:

A beautiful lantern:

Greenery:

Plaques:

Other address lettering:

Soviet architecture:

A traffic light:

An outdoor table:

Doors:

A mighty entryway:

A lovely face:

Trees and bricks:

A brick wall:

The London Fire Brigade’s coat of arms reminds me of the Kiribati flag 🇰🇮:

Chinatown:

A gallery:

A patriotic flag display:

An ice cream van:

A charming car:

A square:

The London Eye:

Big Sister is watching:

A pharmacy swastika:

Wokeness at the Wellcome Collection:

My message:

The first words of one of my favorite poëms, Leisure, on a sticker:

Other city details:

Unlike Italy, there is a lot of Asian and Indian cuisine in London. Its spicy aromas are a delight.

Packaging at the supermarket:

Drinking from a coconut:

A water bottle:

Swedenborg’s Rules of Tremulation:

It’s a shame Selfridges doesn’t sell fridges.

Copenhagen airport in May 2023

Robert — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:55:18 +0500

Robert:

Flying in. Denmark is flat:

A plane. Notice the Scandinavian barcode:

Good-looking packaging:

Books and flags

Robert — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 11:58:34 +0500

Robert:

Don’t burn books and flags.

But don’t sanctify most of them, either.

Genoa in January 2023

Robert — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 11:44:41 +0500

Robert:

Piazza de Ferrari:

The Ancient Port:

Tiling:

A postbox:

Street corners:

A beautiful palace:

A lottery office:

Plaques:

The Genoese flag 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (England began flying it for easier trade):

Widthwise stripes on flags

Robert — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:35:14 +0500

Robert:

Unlike heightwise stripes, widthwise stripes on flags don’t stop any hue from being seen when the wind blows.

🇷🇺

Bergamo in August 2021

Robert — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 10:32:54 +0500

Robert:

A bricky side-street:

Attractive stones:

Elaborately decorated gates:

A manhole:

A logo taking good advantage of the arc:

Air Albania’s logo taking good advantage of its country’s flag 🇦🇱

My Telegram posts during 2020’s week 24

Robert — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 14:10:54 +0500

Robert:

Week 23 ←→ Week 25

Thursday, June 11

The Burundian coat of arms is beautiful:

Friday, June 12

I decided to move some emails from one folder to another. Guess what? Mail can’t sync anymore.

This bug was spotted back in January and it is yet to be fixed.

I might just move to OpenBSD at this point.

Saturday, June 13

I find it funny how Bologna has an investigative group called Ponzi.

Monaco’s flag

Robert — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 18:04:28 +0500

Robert:

This is Monaco’s flag. It’s identical, except for in proportions, to Indonesia’s:
🇲🇨

But Monaco has an alternative flag and pattern (mostly used on licence plates), which reminds of its moneymaker the Casino, which would make Monaco instantly recognisable anywhere on Earth:

Monaco, why not make the latter the official flag?