Reflections #Des100

My favorite designer is AG Fronzoni, an Italian minimalist product and typeface designer who lived from 1923 to 2002. I first became interested in AG Fronzoni’s work when I came across a wall lamp he had designed in 1962, it’s design really stuck with me mainly because of how stripped down and minimalist it was, being nothing more than a black square, with the light being illuminated from the sides (picture below).

This design really stuck with me, and over the next few days I began researching into what else Fronzoni had designed, as well as his main philosophies.

Image of the lamp that inspired my interest in AG Fronzoni's work (taken from http://www.designculture.it/profile/ag-fronzoni.html on the 6/04/2020 at 7:12pm)

AG Fronzoni believed that design should be for the people and as such his client was the community, because of this he was very uncompromising in his designs, aiming to remove anything that was “superfluous, redundant, surplus” and what he described as “wasteful” both in terms of materials and technology but also ethically and morally [1], [2] . Fronzoni was extremely focused on the search for the essential, stripping things away from a design in order to better express it’s meanings, he also utilized empty space extremely effectively believing it to be just as important as full space [1].

Fronzoni saw black and white as “the colours of imagination” (taken from his letter “In praise of the essential”) and as such he used them almost exclusively in the majority of his designs, only using other colors when he thought they would serve a function/ add to the designs message [1] .

I believe that I can take much from AG Fronzoni and his philosophy as I continue with my own design journey. His belief that “less is more” and that by stripping away the complexities of a design can lead to a greater meaning, can be applied to my posters and future designs in order to make them more interesting and less wasteful/cluttered.

References:

[1]: http://www.designculture.it/profile/ag-fronzoni.html/ by Nicola-Matteo Munar 2013-18, accessed on the 09/04/20 at 2:22 pm

[2]: https://www.italianways.com/the-fronzoni-64-series-minimalism-and-the-renaissance/ by unknown author (someone who writes for Italianways) Aug 22 2016, accessed on the on the 09/04/20 at 2:25 pm