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Studiocharlie works in the fields of graphic and product design, typeface design, web design and videos, as well as communications, covering everything from designing brands to corporate identity and corporate typefaces. The trio of people who established Studiocharlie in 2002 and who still work now to generate all the studios ideas and projects are Gabriele Rigamonti, Carla Scorda and Vittorio Turla.

How did Studiocharlie come about and how has its activity’s definition sharpened its focus over the years?
We decided to apply ourselves to a variety of fields right from the very start: product design, graphic design, typeface design, videos and research. We have always been interested in exploring a variety of different areas, of not putting all our design eggs in one basket, as that would have made us run the risk of becoming so hyper-specialised that we could not see what’s around us. So we keep an open-door approach to design: we believe that this approach to our work makes every job in any given field a potential source of learning that we can also apply to others. We have been fortunate enough to be able to check on a daily basis that this intuition functions. Because we have adopted this approach to designing, refusing to restrict ourselves to categories and limits that we believe exist only in the form of words, but not in the actual design itself, we now have a variety of projects to our credit, work that we have found very satisfying.

How does this approach to designing an object transfer into the area of visual communications and graphics?
For us, designing is a method of activity that applies regardless of the particular field in which it is used: categories are not design tools.
We believe it is possible to design on a piece of paper, using lines and colours (as we do when we do our graphic design projects), and apply the same method to drawing on steel with lasers and folds (the 4 Millimetre table for Boffi), to creating fabrics using yarns and weaves (jacquard fabrics for Lanificio Leo) or to designing ceramic tiles (Cubi tiles for Mipa). What counts, we believe, is keeping faith with the original idea, so that we can then work through its necessary evolutions to give our clients and theirs the same degree of emotion back in the tangible product as in a graphic design, looking after every detail to ensure that everything comes out complete and coherent. The material, its form, proportions and balances are all elements that are strictly connected to one another. That is how a thought can keep the purity and simplicity of the original idea once it is translated into concrete practice.

What are the stages, the dynamics and the competences involved in developing a design project?
Design is first and foremost an approach to a random activity, so expresses how you see the world and what you experience in it. What we involve in our work is practically everything that we believe to be conceptually, practically and aesthetically valid. After a first stage when the idea if generated, we apply different kinds of hands-on work and skills, but by that time most of what we understand by the term of “designing” has already been completed. The material we work with changes from time to time, but the way we go about doing things and thinking is always the same.

www.studiocharlie.org