Folger Shakespeare Library

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, we collaborated with Small Design Firm to create some of the graphics of the interactive panels for the exhibit Shakespeare, Life of an Icon for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Throughout 2016, the Folger will be commemorating Shakespeare with a programme titled The Wonder of Will which will include a series of special events, exhibitions, performances and more.

We developed three touchscreen applications. One of them is an interactive timeline of English plays which shows Shakespeare’s work as well as other writers. The plays are displayed per year and the participant can select the option he or she is interested in to find out more about the work. We also created two applications that use half-silvered mirrors which allows visitors to trace images drawn on the screen. The first of these applications walks the user through designing a coat of arms, and the second shows the user how to write using secretary hand, a sixteenth century handwriting system.

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All photos by Yassine El Mansouri Photography. ©2016 Small Design Firm.

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Recent projects

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

Consulting and design work for MIT’s pioneering unit CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). Housed within the Stata Center, designed by Architect Frank Gehry, CSAIL is a leading research center which has been imagining and building the future for more than 50 years.

Adelle Mono Flex

Poster designed to promote Adelle Mono. The Adelle family continues its stylistic expansion with the release of Adelle Mono and Adelle Mono Flex by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. Monospaced typefaces are the default choice for developers and programmers and are also an aesthetic choice for many designers and communicators.

Catalpa

Poster designed for a new typeface designed by Veronika Burian, Azza Alameddine & José Scaglione. Catalpa was made to be an overwhelming headliner, like the quirky and hulking wood type that inspired it. With only four thin and four heavy weights, being a display family is its single-minded purpose.

To Benefit Society

Beginning with midcentury virtues, Postea is the typographic rational response for pixel or paper text — a lyrical take on geometric sans serifs. Classic curves and purposeful details make it ideal for branding, signage, corporate typefaces, and magazines.

Lektorat

Poster designed to promote Lektorat, a font family by Florian Fecher. From masthead to colophon, Lektorat has six concise text styles and 21 display styles to captivate, educate, and motivate within any editorial purpose.

Inline Three

Font design for generic signage system based on some of the architectural features of a stadium.

Postea

Promotional poster for a new sans-serif font designed by TypeTogether. The Postea font family is Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s take on German geometric typefaces, reshaped with the right attributes for setting paragraphs and headings, and perfect for branding and text use. Find out more about this font here.

Mountain architects

Mountain is an architecture studio of award-winning architects working out of Bristol and London. The practice is now working on a range of buildings across the UK and internationally.

The Golden Age of Spanish Art

The Spanish art collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce includes significant examples of paintings and sculptures made in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The Exhibition “The Golden Age of Spanish Art” presents a representative sample of artworks created during one of the most fruitful eras in the history of art. These artists were admired not only by their contemporaries but also by successive generations of artists and collectors in both Europe and America.

WIPR

Development of new visual identity, including a bespoke alphabet and a large set of icons, for Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corporation (Radio & TV). The resulting unicase type family, WIPR Unicase, was created taking into consideration the old TV station's brand. This family has several alternative lettershapes which gave us more freedom to design future logos for sub-brands.

Air Report

Poster designed for the exhibition Air Report by argentine artist Julián D’Angiolillo, organized and curated by Móvil, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art based in Buenos Aires.

Nice People

Logo re-design for Buena Gente (Nice People), a leading bilingual consulting firm that empowers individuals and organizations by focusing on everyday social behaviour.

Mist

Santiago Porter’s work has been always connected with his interest in finding relations between the aspect of things and what has happened to them. “Bruma” (Mist) is the result of the deepening of his quest. Divided in three chapters, this book shows us how public buildings, obsolete monuments and landscapes manifest their history.

Musica Aperta website 2018

Website for Musica Aperta - Latin for “Open Music”- a performance arts ensemble that presents music in concert with other arts and media. Its objective is to enhance the experience of music for all audiences by transcending the traditional notion of the musical concert. Our productions entertain and excite by performing music along side complementary art forms such as drama, dance, the visual arts, poetry and even the culinary arts.

Buena Interactive

Buena is the trademark of an internet programming and development studio based in Buenos Aires, which focuses on content-driven user experiences. The logo is inspired in Josef Albers' Kombinations-Schrift.

The Interior Castle

Promotional pieces for The Interior Castle, a concert presented by Musica Aperta in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila, commissioned by the Carmelite Monastery of Boston. Design of two CD jackets and their insert booklets, a DVD box, a poster and a programme for the event.

Móvil 2014-2017

Poster designed to celebrate the first ten exhibitions organized and curated by Móvil, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art. The design of this poster juxtaposes fragments of the ten posters originally used to promote the exhibitions.

Growth

A variegated audience of over one thousand people gathered on April 6, 2017 at the San Juan Symphonic Hall to listen and reflect on Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz’ words of caution and forward-looking advise regarding Puerto Rico’s economic predicament.

Connecting the world

ioThink offers technological solutions that can change the way we live and work, as they enhance and improve our connection with the world around us, while intending to make a more efficient and sustainable use of our time, energy and resources.

ioThink uses IoT technologies (Internet of Things) to connect sensors and devices with the Cloud in order to integrate them with apps that offer access to real-time data and therefore help analyse information in a more precise way, positively affecting our decision taking.

Móvil postcard

Postcard designed to celebrate the first ten exhibitions organized and curated by Móvil, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art. The design of this postcard contains photographic details of the ten exhibitions.

Móvil 2017

Flyers designed for two exhibitions organized by Móvil in 2017. Móvil is an independent non-commercial organization involved in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. Its main interest is experimentation and bringing emerging practice closer to the wide public. For further information, visit www.movil.org.ar

Present

A lot has happened since the disastrous Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. Fortunately, the devastated landscape goes a bit greener every day, alongside a newborn feeling of hope, solidarity, empathy and unity among its citizens.

In celebration of the triumph of hope against adversity, the Museo de Arte de Ponce titled its 36th Annual Gala "PResente", to commemorate the determined and restless spirit of the Puerto Rican people as they face these unfortunate events.

Km Cero

Kilómetro Cero develops projects which help strengthen citizenship and empower Puerto Ricans when dealing with issues of security among their communities, justice and participation.

The Universe in a Thread

Booklet design for El universo en un hilo (The Universe in a Thread), a performance inspired in the opera genre written and directed by Marina De Caro, born from a visual poem that aims to turn the body into sound, and technique and knowledge into poetry.

Drones & Cameras

Inimatics is an Argentine company with over 10 years experience in working with digital imagery. They use the latest drone technology available and photo cameras combined with a extensive knowhow in data processing.

Exhibiciones Móvil

Flyers designed for 8 exhibitions organized by Móvil in 2014–2016. Móvil is an independent non-commercial organization involved in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. Its main interest is experimentation and bringing emerging practice closer to the wide public. For further information, visit www.movil.org.ar

Folger Shakespeare Library

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, we collaborated with Small Design Firm to create some of the graphics of the interactive panels for the exhibit Shakespeare, Life of an Icon for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Throughout 2016, the Folger will be commemorating Shakespeare with a programme titled The Wonder of Will which will include a series of special events, exhibitions, performances and more.

Sosolimited

2014 website designed in collaboration with Soso Limited, an art and technology studio with offices in Boston and San Diego, which explores the boundaries between art, design, experience and information.

Ibsen Festival 2016

Monsters of Reality: The Mimesis Machine is a one day happening. A constellation of invited artists from Norway and Greece filling the gilded corridors of the National Theatre with live performance, installations and interactions, using fiction to find truth.

Carlos Rolón / Dzine

The work created for this exhibition examines diaspora through the repurposing of common everyday objects. Railings, cement cinderblocks, hand crafted macramé, repurposed shattered tempered automobile glass, iconic floral and vegetation native to the Caribbean are reimagined into paintings, sculptures, a floating garden and tactile celestial works. Tropicalizia is a reflection on culture, social practice, community and identity.

It’s the economy, intelligent!

A day of lectures to think about economy from the perspective of sociology, history and art, programmed and presented by artist and writer Leticia Obeid.

Memory of nature

Visual identity for the exhibition Memory of Nature: The Rhythm of Life by Diógenes Ballester. Inspired by the elements and forms present in Ballester’s paintings, we made a few tweaks and additions to the institutional font Avenir Next, which resulted in a simple but distinctive solution, consistent with the Museum's identity.

Isabel II

Logotype and promotional pieces for Isabel II: Images of Power between Spain and Puerto Rico, 1833-1868. An exhibition that includes several portraits of Isabel II at different ages, illustrating the difficulty of creating an official image for a queen reviled by her subjects since childhood.

Gustave Doré

The history of Jesus' passion and death has been an inspiration to a large number of artists throughout the centuries. According to the curator Pablo Pérez d'Ors, French artist Gustave Doré stands out among them for the intense darkness he portrays, representing the scenes of one of the greatest stories ever told. The exhibition invites the public to discover and understand how Doré created totally original images drawn from the Gospel.

Center for Innovation in Educational Technology

Project of identity for the Mindslove Center for Innovation in Educational Technology, engaged in investigation and development of hardware or software products for education located in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Interactive Dynamics

Creation of logotype for Interactive Dynamics. Company dedicated to offering interactive experiences through innovative technological solutions that are based in the interaction of humans and machines.

Made in 1965

Invitation to the 2015 Gala, held every year at the Ponce Art Museum of Puerto Rico. On this opportunity, the building's 50th anniversary was the theme that inspired the design of the Gala's brand. The building was originally designed in 1965 by architect Edward Durell Stone. The numbers 9 and 6 represent the iconic staircase of the Museum's lobby.

Anniversary

Symbol designed to commemorate the building's 50th anniversary. It was originally designed in 1965 by architect Edward Durell Stone. The hexagon represents the galleries and the iconic ceiling of the Museum's second floor.

Móvil

Móvil is an independent non-commercial organization involved in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. Its main interest is experimentation and bringing emerging practice closer to the wide public.

Alegría, Alegría, Alegría

For the 2014 Gala, named Joy, Joy, Joy, we designed an invitation inspired in Jack Délano's multidimensional work. Specifically, we adapted a series of letters drawn by the artist himself in 1953. Red and gold were the colors selected, referring to Christmas time, since the event was held close to the holidays.

Golden Era

Golden Era is an event organized by the Ponce Art Museum of Puerto Rico, for the pre-opening of the Decadence and Revolution Exhibition: Art in Vienna, 1890-1910. The font on the cover was especially adapted for this piece, accompanied by a detail of Alexander Rothaug's Dido in the funeral pile.

Art & Chance

Art & Chance is born in 2010, as an initiative supporting the “Capital Campaign” to help finance the renovation and expansion project for the Ponce Art Museum of Puerto Rico.

Art of Having

Art of Having is an initiative of the Art Circle for the benefit of the renovation and expansion project for the Ponce Art Museum of Puerto Rico. 20 original works of artists were raffled in order to raise funds for increasing the Museum's educational and cultural services, continuously offered to the community.

Identities

Borikén

Cultural show broadcasted by WIPR-TV. ADN Boricua's contents range from mainstream expressions to marginal ones or those that go totally unnoticed for most of Puerto Rican society.

CNE15

The Center for a New Economy is Puerto Rico's first and only independent think-tank producing independent research and policy on issues related to economic development.

Children's Orchestra of DC

The Children's Orchestra of DC is an after school initiative hosted at the Garrison Elementary School which provides students the opportunity to learn an instrument, play in an orchestra or sing in a choir.

Espacios abiertos

Espacios Abiertos, Open Spaces, is a Puerto Rican organization striving to strengthen the capacities of people, organizations and communities to successfully act in a political, social and institutional framework.

In Puerto Rico, the expression ¡ea! has a connotation of surprise, i.e. Wow!

Grupo Insud

Grupo Insud is formed by a group of Argentine companies. The name ‘Insud’ is an acronym for innovation, sustainability and development, which reflect the guiding principles for the daily work of all of its companies. The Group's areas of expertise are life sciences, information and culture, agribusiness and, lastly, nature and design.

Guru Rendezvous

Identity for film production company specialized in documentaries which explore themes related to spirituality.

Logo refresh

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

Consulting and design work for MIT’s pioneering unit CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). Housed within the Stata Center, designed by Architect Frank Gehry, CSAIL is a leading research center which has been imagining and building the future for more than 50 years.

Pomera

Pomera Maderas is an Argentine forestry-industrial company specialized in the production of high-quality solid wood. It owns over 32,000 afforested hectares North of Argentina and Paraguay.

Cultural Institutions

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Design consultancy for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, New York, developed in collaboration with Small Design Firm and Timon Botez. We included an information system containing cultural and historic context about the gallery and divided the data in two categories: research and recommendations.

Nobel Peace Center

Stencil signage system, including family of pictograms, created for the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

Miscellaneous

Eye magazine: Buenos Aires project

Article by César Sesio & Verónica Devalle

In 2005 Buenos Aires became the first city to be designated a Unesco City of Design. A wander through its central neighbourhoods – such as Recoleta, San Telmo or Palermo – leaves you in no doubt why. Examples of design, such as hip fashion, interior decoration and urban architecture which can be found in every cosmopolitan city, are significant features of their landscape. But the city’s love affair with design is not a recent phenomenon, in fact it is a result of globalisation; it has a pedigree that stretches back 60 years to a time when artists, architects and designers embraced European Modernism as humanity recovered from WWII.

Collection of logos and symbols

Friends & collaborators

David Small

Dave is the founder and creative director of Small Design Firm, which specializes in the design and implementation of interactive, dynamic graphical applications. Dave received his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 1999. His thesis, Rethinking the Book, examined how digital media, in particular the use of three-dimensional and dynamic typography, will change the way designers approach large bodies of information. Shortly after receiving his PhD, Dave founded Small Design Firm. From 2008 to 2010 Dave also served as associate professor at his alma mater, directing a research group at the MIT Media Lab. His doctoral work was recently acquired by the design department of the Museum of Modern Art and is part of their permanent collection.

José Scaglione

José Scaglione is a graphic designer, typeface designer, and co-founder of the independent type foundry TypeTogether with Veronika Burian, where they have published numerous award-winning type families. He teaches typography at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is frequently invited to lecture about typography and to lead workshops on typeface design at international conferences and academic institutions. José co-authored the book Cómo Crear Tipografías: Del Boceto a la Pantalla, and collaborated with Jorge de Buen Unna on his book Introducción al Estudio de la Tipografía. In 2012 José acted as chairman of the Letter.2 type design competition and conference. In 2013 he was appointed president of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI).

Leo Saltamerenda

Buena is an internet programming and development studio founded by Leo Saltamerenda based in Buenos Aires, which focuses on content-driven user experiences. Today, in the internet galaxy, things are happening in a different order than it used to a couple of decades ago. No more graphic caprices, no more literal translations from the print world to the digital world. Graphic designers must be aware of the latest technological and programming developments, understand how people use those devices, understand their needs and routines and know about the large and wide range of developing possibilities. The design plan has to be built side by side with coders and UI specialists and taking into account many aspects as optimizing perfomance, optimizing images, typographic fonts, delaying images load, a smart use of interaction animations, sounds, behaves and reacts.

Juan Beccar Varela

Artist and photographer, Juan Beccar Varela begun working on digital post-production and colorimetry both for him and other artists in 2006. Since then he has become one of the most refined image retouchers in Buenos Aires, and has specialised in art books and the fashion industry. His expertise can handle the transformation of low res images into high res ones, the calibration, colour grading and optimisation of pictures and the production of new images from a wide range of files including typography, graphics, illustrations or photographs, no matter whether they are meant for large scale billboards, books and catalogues or digital supports. Among others, he has worked for artists such as Nicola Costantino and Rosana Schoijett and for catalogues on the work of Teresa Burga, Claudia Andújar, Diego Bianchi and Adrián Villar Rojas.

Ralph du Carrois

In 2003 Ralph and Jenny founded the studio Carrois in Berlin. Whilst designing Suzuki’s corporate typefaces, it became clear that their former focus on Graphic Design would rather switch to Type Design. From then on, they concentrated on designing and extending typefaces for multiple clients. In the first place for Erik Spiekermann and his companies. From 2008 on, their network and scope of clients expanded. In 2017 Ralph founded the bBox Type foundry together with his long-time partner Anja Meiners while Jenny concentrated on graphic design and illustration again. Today Jenny and Ralph work on design and concepts again.

Sarah Morris

Sarah is a content developer and copywriter— that is, an information sorter. She winnows ideas into a clearly organized content approach, whether a simple brochure or website to a complex exhibit installation or complete rebranding exercise. She achieves clarity by carefully considering the client’s mission and core values, project goals, the intended audience, and key messages. Sarah has been a full-time content consultant for over 15 years. Her primary focus is interpretive (educational) content for museum exhibitions, but she also has extensive branding and material expertise for corporate and nonprofit clients.

Matias Steimborchel

Industrial designer based in Buenos Aires. He produces architecture and product renders as well as 3D animations for clients involved in construction, architecture, industrial design and advertising. He is also an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of UADE, Buenos Aires.

Eric Gunther

Eric Gunther was born in New York in 1978. He studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT, where he also worked on his Masters thesis in tactile composition at the MIT Media Lab. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is co-founder of the art and design firm Sosolimited. For seven years, Eric worked as Art Director at Small Design Firm, where he created high-tech interactive installations for clients around the world. He builds vibrotactile sculptures and thinks about how to create new aesthetic experiences for the body using technology.

Iwan Essery

Iwan learnt his trade as an archaeological and landscape photographer at Manchester University and was fortunate enough to be taken on as an assistant to an interiors and still life photographer whilst living in London. When not in France or Ireland visiting family, Iwan loves travelling and going to quirky and out of the way places. He plays piano in a jazz band, with varying degrees of success. He loves wine, trees and amplifiers, not necessarily in that order.

Masumi Briozzo

Masumi Briozzo is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Buenos Aires. Studied at Central Saint Martins and worked for Pentagram London. Works both locally and internationally.

Belen Hermida

Translator and simultaneous interpreter, she graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, continuing her specialization in Argentina and abroad. With 25+ experience, she has covered different business areas, as broad as sports, ballet, advertising, marketing, business in general, public health, steel industry, accounting or culture, both in written translations and as an interpreter in congresses, courses and workshops. Co-founder of Word by Word, company mainly devoted to simultaneous interpretation. Her language studies also include French and Portuguese.

Santiago Porter

Santiago Porter was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. His photography work has been shown in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Argentina and abroad and is also included in several public and private collections.