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Vertigo works in the field of visual design, where it specialises in creating visual identity systems for clients in the private sector, institutions and cultural organisations. The practice deals with corporate identities, corporate publishing, brand images, advertising, multimedia design and exhibition design.

How did Vertigo Design come about and develop to the format it has today?
Vertigo Design was set up in 1999 by Mario Fois and Mario Rullo, who pooled the experience they had accumulated in the field of visual communications to found a practice that would specialise in all aspects of visual design.
The practice then attracted various skills that had evolved in apparently radically different sectors: from design for culture to co-ordinated imaging and experiences with advertising. Since then, Vertigo has developed a rational, functional working method that puts the client’s needs in the focus of the design process and aims at tailoring a custom suit of clothes, drawing on visual and design cultures, as well as on stimuli from popular culture.

On what ideological and methodological foundations do you build your work?
Vertigo Design does not push a single style, but proposes a working method, whose aim is to generate sustainable strategies and solutions that are durable also in visual terms. Our aim is to create solutions oriented to communications so that they can become a distinctive factor, while remaining easy to interpret, useful and convincing. Italo Calvino encapsulated perfectly the creative thinking from which we try to draw our inspiration in the fourth of his American Lessons, devoted to Visibility: “The power to focus on visions with your eyes closed”.

How do you go about designing visual identity systems?
In the past, the focus of visual communications was directed primarily at organising individual events, or events grouped together in rigid, static identity systems. These days, as the world is becoming increasingly complex and in a constant state of evolutionary flux, corporate communications are also oriented towards acting systematically and dynamically, using all the media necessary to achieve their goals and in particular to valorise the brand, establishing lines for development for the identity in future.
As the media that can be used to supply information and the complexity of communications have increased on a par with the operating tools available, our function as designers has evolved from an activity related to producing “artefacts” to a more articulated one that calls on us to manage and co-ordinate complex projects. When you develop a visual communications project these days, you take in a wide sweep that ranges from multimedia to exhibition design, from advertising to corporate identity and from institutional publishing to guerrilla marketing: it is this multidisciplinary approach that distinguishes the work we do at Vertigo Design.

What significance do case studies have for your work?
For us, all those design experiences that enable us to develop on themes or techniques of communication and present exemplary experiences to potential new clients come under the heading of “case studies”.
For example, we have accumulated a considerable amount of experience in the aerospace industry and with new technologies. It’s a complex area of production, because of its scope, because of the diversity of the firms working in it and because of the particular nature of the products that need to be communicated. As a result, we are always on the lookout for solutions that avoid the empty rhetoric of illustrating technology for technology’s sake, preferring to go with ideas that convey an idea of the positive spin-offs to be enjoyed from this type of innovation.


www.vertigodesign.it