
Francesco E. GuidaPolitecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Design
Francesco E. Guida
PhD
Designing narratives and histories
About
64
Publications
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Introduction
Architect, author and associate professor. He started to work as co-editor of an underground music magazine at the beginning of the 90’s and has been working as a graphic designer since. He is a consultant for visual identity, wayfinding systems and publishing design. His works have been exhibited in group shows in Italy and abroad and published in several books and national and international directories.
Additional affiliations
October 2010 - May 2022
Education
September 2005 - April 2009
September 1989 - December 1998
Publications
Publications (64)
«PAD. Pages on Arts and Design» journal (V. 15, N. 23, ISSN 1972-7887). Authors: F. E. Guida, L. Bollini, A. Facchetti, S. Melis, D. Murgia, C. Ureta Marín, M. Chilet Bustamante, M. Moretti, A. Bosco, S. Gasparotto, M. Lengua, E. Scotucci, A. Vendetti, A. Andrade, L. Défayes, E. Groves, N. Henchoz, D. Ribes, M. Salzmann, A. Schneider, I. Ruggeri, G...
The relationship between memory and the digital world prompts inquiries of various dimensions, to which the culture of design can contribute in identifying possible answers or even further igniting an already vibrant debate. The research initiative, titled “Digital Memories”, was specifically dedicated to exploring the realm of digital design throu...
Teaching the history of a discipline is a way of gradually introducing students to a phylogenetic path that presents its foundations, relationships, and implications from its origins to the present day. In the context of the history of more practice-oriented disciplines and design in particular, editorial production is scarce. Considering the sub-s...
Provare a definire oggi le specificità del design della comunicazione può rivelarsi un esercizio azzardato, per quanto necessario. Periodicamente, la comunità accademica e professionale torna a interrogarsi sulle dimensioni della pratica, sulle competenze e conoscenze necessarie, sui confini della disciplina o delle discipline che è possibile defin...
The paper, presenting some of the projects developed in a Communication Design Studio at Politecnico di Milano under the title of Anthropogenic Narratives, aims to discuss how teaching visual identity and experience design in communication design undergraduate education may be developed within an anti-disciplinary approach, adopting a speculative d...
This paper aims to present and discuss how the teaching of visual identity and experience design in Communication Design education may be developed within a speculative design framework. By adopting this approach, students can experience the ethics of design practice and explore alternative design values, forms, and representations. They become fam...
Graphicus. Progettare la Comunicazione
1082/0014 (2023)
What if the brand is a place? In specialist literature, the brand interacts through a series of tangible and intangible touchpoints with its interlocutors. Whether it is points of sale, events, websites, packaging and products, the interlocutor enters the world of the brand and experiences it through these touchpoints. However, a brand must adapt i...
As a new generation of necessary terminals for future homes, smart homes have become one of the essential mediums for smart aging at home. This paper aims to explore how older adults who age at home can overcome the digital divide of the new medium and achieve social participation in the home context to realize active aging. Based on the theory of...
As a new generation of essential terminals for future homes environment, smart home has become one of the important media for smart home care, which has the potential to improve the social participation of the elderly at home, but the utilization rate is not high, and the user experience is not good. It mainly explores the influencing factors of us...
«PAD. Pages on Arts and Design» journal (V. 16, N. 24, ISSN 1972-7887). Authors: F. E. Guida, L. Bollini, V. Cristallo, M. Mariani, C.L. Remondino, P. Tamborrini, M. Borsotti, M. Mason, Y. Zhang, R. Trocchianesi, M. Wang, G. Cordin, R. Angari, M. De Chirico, G. Amoruso, M. Ciancia, E. Casadei, A. Ianniello, M. Motta, G.M. Conti, E. Rossi, V. Masell...
This paper aims to present and discuss how teaching visual identity and experience design in Communication Design undergraduate education may be developed within an anti-disciplinary approach, adopting a speculative design framework. By adopting this approach, students become familiar with design as a problem-seeking and problem-finding practice, w...
Nel 2009 AIAP, oggi Associazione italiana design della comunicazione visiva, ha costituito il Centro di documentazione sul progetto grafico (AIAP CDPG). L’ambizione e al tempo stesso la mission del Centro si basano sul presupposto che “produrre cultura per la professione è un corollario indispensabile per le associazioni”, ma ancor più lo è “il tem...
This paper aims to present and discuss how the teaching of visual identity and experience design in Communication Design education may be developed within a speculative design framework. By assuming this approach, students can experience the ethics of design practice and explore alternative design values, forms, and representations. They can acquir...
Storia dell'Urbanistica, Speciale n. 1 / 2021, pp. 200-213.
Bob Noorda (Amsterdam, 1927 - Milan, 2010) is considered one of the most important Italian graphic designers. Dutch by birth and training, since 1954 he was in Milan where he immediately began important professional collaborations (with Pirelli, for example). Each of us has met over and o...
«PAD. Pages on Arts and Design» (V. 13, N. 19, ISSN: 1972-7887).
Authors: M.R. Ferrara, F.E. Guida, L. Bollini, M. À. Fortea, C. Ferrara, C. Quint, E. Bertolotti, V. Bucchetti, F. Casnati, A. Barbara, P. Ciandrini.
PAD dedicated the year 2020 entirely to women, their creativity and design action. The focus of issue 18, entitled “The Women’s Makin...
Great histories of design and graphic design, both in Italy and internationally, reserve a secondary or minor role for women. Referring in particular to the so-called golden age of Italian graphic design – between the 1950s and the early 1970s – very few female figures have emerged. However, through accurate research on primary sources and original...
The great histories of graphic design, both in Italy and internationally, reserve a secondary or minor role for women. Some publications have recently placed this question in a critical form, trying to understand the reasons for it, as well as accounting gaps and absences. However, if we refer in particular to what we could define as the golden age...
13 projects on death.
13 speculations translated into communicative machines. Artifacts, devices, interactions, stories as a result of an experience of learning, knowledge and growth.
13 speculations to discuss the present, anticipate the future, question certainties, face uncertainties.
13 projects ready to be displayed to the public but confin...
What makes humans human? A query that sounds easy, but hides an underlying complexity. What is it that makes us human? Which are the features that define our uniqueness from all other living creatures? This exploration is endless and controversial, but it indicates a specific attitude: the ability to reflect and to create stories in which to believ...
The history of Italian design and graphic design is mainly Milan-centred, especially if we look at the post-war period between the 1950s and the early 1970s. There is a need to reconsider the boundaries of this history, analysing other contexts and extending the list of parameters to consider. The south of Italy has never been taken into account in...
In 2009 AIAP, the Italian Association of graphic designers, founded the Graphic Design Documentation Centre (CDPG) with the aim of collecting, cataloguing, archiving, enhancing and promoting any document related to graphic design and visual communication. The activities of the Centre are focused on the documentation of graphic design culture (histo...
Project realized during the Final Synthesis Design Studio C1, 2017-2018, Bachelor in Communication Design, School of Design, Politecnico di Milano.
Designing means giving shape to what is yet to be born; it means always reaching for new standards of representation, balancing creativity and emotion. Words Works is the story of how ideas come to life...
In Compasses (ISSN 2409-3823), N. 27 (2018)
Edited by: C. Ferrara, L. Moretti, D. Piscitelli
Project realized during the Final Synthesis Design Studio, Academic year 2016-2017, Bachelor in Communication Design, School of Design, Politecnico di Milano
The line separating visual designer and developer appears to be blurring, and this is not limited to the screen or projected image. It also affects the design of physical spaces and the empiric field. The increasing accessibility to open technologies allows visual designers to conceptualize and practice new processes and results in the representati...
The communication design field it's considerably changed in the last 20 years and more as well as the role of the designer. Technology has modified the daily work tools and new possible relations between the designer, the commitment and the final user can be underlined. Observing some of the most experimental practices, new visual languages have dr...
Mario Dagrada has been a graphic designer and advertiser whose work is almost unknown. Of particular interest is the cover design for the Rizzoli series launched starting from the early sixties when the Milan-based design and industries were growing rapidly.
The project Aiap Women in Design Award moves along the research path that Aiap opened some time ago with the aim of identifying contributions, testimonies, styles and trends in communication design. The idea is to try and reconstruct a history (or several histories) of graphic design, not necessarily through its leading figures or those who have be...
and orientate users in specific areas. A site becomes accessible to users through such kind of systems. Wayfinding helps to communicate and make clear functions, paths and becomes a true interface between a place and the users. Signals can have a stronger role in terms of visual language in making evidence to a place’s identity.
Enhancing it at the...
Piccolo contributo monografico dedicato al lavoro del graphic designer Ilio Negri (Milano, 1926-1974), i cui materiali sono conservati nel Fondo Ilio Negri depositato presso il Centro di Documentazione sul Progetto Grafico di Aiap, Associazione italiana design della comunicazione visiva.
The archive holds records of Ilio Negri (Milan, 1926-1974) p...
In the communication design field, main applications of a generative approach are for information graphics and flexible visual identities. Looking to recent practices we can observe cases of visual identities – that can be defined as dynamic or post-logo – that present a completely opposite approach compared to the traditional production in the fie...
Today the rigid hierarchy of visual identity, which has been consolidated over time, has been placed into question. Various factors have contributed to this remix: the technological factor above all, but also others associated with the critique, aesthetics and ethics of communicating.
The world of cultural heritage has certainly not remained immune...
In quella che possiamo definire come “epoca della transizione” – segnata dal passaggio dai sistemi analogici a quelli digitali – il carattere tipografico si è trasformato ben oltre le sue apparenze formali. È possibile affermare che il type design – l’area disciplinare nell’ambito del design della comunicazione visiva che si occupa di progettare ca...
Pochi studi sono stati dedicati a ripercorrere una storia italiana del design legata agli eventi olimpici. Questo articolo si propone di colmare alcune lacune studiando il progetto degli architetti Albini ed Helg e del graphic designer Steiner per i VII Giochi Olimpici Invernali di Cortina (1956), in cui furono coinvolti per concepire la città come...
Negli ultimi 15 anni, con l’affermarsi delle tecnologie del digitale nella gestione dei processi progettuali, si è assistito a una sostanziale modificazione dell’impalcatura di costruzione dei codici della “corporate image”, dell’immagine coordinata. L’“image” è sempre più metamorfica, sempre meno statica e immutabile. Il termine metamorfico intend...
Type Design, ovvero progetto del carattere tipografico. Da quando il personal computer è entrato nelle nostre case, il carattere tipografico - il font, come è uso chiamarlo oggi - non appare più semplicemente come l'elemento primo per comporre la scrittura riprodotta sulla carta. È divenuto, di pari passo con l'accelerazione del flusso comunicativo...
Il lavoro della Ferrante si distingue per una straordinaria continuità – da cui il titolo della mostra – che le ha permesso di attraversare la seconda metà del Novecento fino a tutto il primo decennio dei 2000 passando dalla professione di progettista grafico alla pittura, dalla calligrafia alla sperimentazione artistica. Un percorso in cui si ritr...
Bob Noorda, one of the great Italian graphic (born in Holland), has defined with his work, the visual image of some of the most important italian brands (ENI to the Region of Lombardy, but also Coop, Feltrinelli, Mondadori and many others).
Among the industrial and institutional brands, Noorda invented or redesigned the Italian Touring Club, with w...
Un bene culturale ha un intrinseco valore di relazione ovvero la sua identità , la sua unicità, è data dalle relazioni che si instaurano tra un bene e l’intorno, alla scala più ampia e diversificata. Proprio questo processo di riconoscimento da parte di una comunità, identifica un bene culturale e lo rende tale: il valore d’uso del bene è che possi...
Complex architectures require an accurate communication plan to guide its spaces, functions and flows.
The signs that inhabit the surfaces of the projects designed by Gourdin & Müller of Leipzig create an ongoing dialogue with the architecture.
Sign systems are the organization of information about a place, in order to make it more understandable and easily usable. For natural environments, it can also become a planning tool.
Paths on a territory emphasize it and safeguard it. It is important to keep a good level of information along with
respect for a natural context.
Relationships between visual communication and architecture are solved in a signage system where light becomes the protagonist and links content and container. This is the project of Integral Ruedi Baur et associés for the "Cinémathèque Française": screened information, light rays narrating and entertaining informing and leading, creating the conti...
New museums are still evolving and are increasingly representative of free time: they have to be open and accessible. In new museums, communication and new technologies still give their important contribution.
The design system of "contact points" helps in building the global image, guaranteeing to the users a high degree of handiness.
Il contributo culturale e progettuale della comunicazione visiva alla pubblica amministrazione in Italia.
Una breve trattazione che cerca di definire i contorni storici, teorici e pratici entro cui un progetto di comunicazione coordinata può essere sviluppato nell’ambito, in continua evoluzione, dei beni culturali
italiani.
4 progetti di comunicazione coordinata (Museo di Capodimonte, Pompei, Mart e Techtour) ideati e realizzati per contesti e con mod...