Emanuele Piarulli studio visit and COP brief outline

I went down to London on Friday afternoon to meet Emanuele Piarulli as a precursor to our collaboration as part of my COP practical brief. The meeting was a success with clear insights into Emanuele's practise as well as a chance to grab some pictures of his manifesto produced last year. Currently, he is working for a 7-year-old sustainable fashion startup to pay his rent in the capital but he of course still plans to push his own fashion house and solely focus on that as soon as possible. The way I can help out is through bringing the professionalism and brand continuity of a type family to be used on a variety of print and eventually visual mediums. Gaining an idea for Emanuele's personality and how it rationalises a lot of his work was a vital step within the project. 

    

Here are some notes I made during the meeting:

Preference for handwriting

Cococaptain 

French type serifs for height in headlines 

Courier - Typewritten serifs, traditional forms 

Arts thread 

Luca Guarini Dus magazine

His choice of typography used throughout his manifesto really interested me and the rationale seemed to back up some of my early thinking on the potential visual direction of the project. So the body text being written in Courier is due to its 'traditional' nature as a typewriter inspired typeface, my take in initial ideas has been slightly different so far but along the same train of thought as I've gone as far back as blackletter to give the same sentiment. He also gave a preference for there to be some element of the hand incorporated into any outcomes, which ties in nicely with the blackletter and calligraphic forms backbone. Tall elegant san serif is then used for headings and titles which is more of a nod towards Italian modernism, references towards his home country should definitely be made for appropriate outcomes. There should also be some consideration towards the 'gender' of any type produced as playing with the concept of masculinity is a very important feature throughout Emanuele's work. Maybe questions around the 'gender' of forms should be raised within my essay.  

I then showed Emanuele some quick sketches I had done and asked him to pick out elements he enjoyed and refine the direction of the visual output further. 

Emanuele demonstrated a clear preference for the more elaborate, over decorative S's with regards to the high form typeface.

He rated dynamic blackletter forms although felt there should be some more contrast in this E via a more angular bottom corner instead of the traditionally curved form.

Emanuele seemed to favour the intricate and angular forms with the detached upper two lines being drawn in one continuous angular motion.

 He liked the idea of having one continuous line for each form but was very clear about having the contrast between curve and angle.

 The S seen here was in part appropriated from Emanuele's logo which he designed himself and features some distorted blackletter type forms.
He said he would be open to letters like this where two elements interact or collide to create a holistic form.

He made reference to the above E being a little over-complicated, although he liked the concept of a blackletter backbone with more fluid forms almost draped around it as a clear reference to clothing adorning a muscular male body.

*retrospective add to #fashioning the industry*