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Andrea Rauch is a graphic designer whose portfolio includes images and identities for public authorities, cultural institutions and political movements. His posters can be admired in the permanent collections at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Advertising at the Louvre in Paris and the Design Museum in Zurich. 

What significant milestones do you look back on in your professional career?
I’d say certain key times when I met some fundamental people. I have been lucky and had the honour to make the acquaintance of some of the twentieth century’s most important graphic designers and illustrators. Here are a few names: Leo Lionni, Emanuele Luzzati, Milton Glaser, Alan Fletcher, Shigeo Fukuda and Roberto Innocenti. With them, and many others, I have conceived exhibitions, designed posters and co-ordinated events. They have been crucial to shaping my professional background and to developing the ideas that are still at the root of my work to this day. Seeing their work up close, sharing their experiences and above all interacting with them was an exciting, once-in-a-lifetime experience. They are great masters, the kind that every young man should have and whose example he should always try to emulate.

What aspects of graphic design have been and still are essential to your work?
Graphic design work as members of my generation have experienced it (I was born in 1948) has always been a practical application of the art of making do. The graphic designer has had to double a bit in every role, from the copywriter to the art director, as well as the illustrator and sometimes the photographer, too. In this process of “God helps those who help themselves”, there are many pieces of work that look more significant when seen in perspective. I think that the thing I have done most often and to my own greatest satisfaction has been designing posters. I have done more than seven hundred and, even though many of them have now been – I believe justifiably – forgotten, I am still very happy and also quite proud of several.
Just recently, I have been working with the publisher Prìncipi & Princìpi (the name translates as Princes and Principles), pursuing an old unrequited passion of mine to design and illustrate children’s books.

What idea of visual design do you think we should transmit to the younger generation of graphic designers?
I have always thought that not very many keywords are necessary to define our work. One of those words could be “didactics”, by which I mean the attempt and the commitment to pool the heritage of experiences of which each one of us is a bearer and make them available to the new generations of graphic designers.
The other important word that I would place at the foundation of the graphic designer’s profession is “responsibility”. Our work is in front of everyone’s eyes, by definition: it’s job is to communicate, convince and sell. It stimulates sensations and suggests behaviour. There is an enormous difference between communicating “well” or “badly”. A friend once told me that we should always try to leave the world a little better than how we found it: with that in mind, there’s a world of difference between a good professional and a professional who is aware and responsible.

What horizons have you explored in your research?
Graphic design is evolving really rapidly. What looks important to us formally today is not the same as we saw yesterday and is destined to be very different from what we shall be seeing tomorrow. What you call “lines of research” – at least in my case – are reduced to a sort of navigation by sight, with constant reappraisals, changes of direction and course corrections. I don’t know what I am looking for today, nor do I know what I’ll be looking for tomorrow. I expect to explore my time, both conceptual and technological. I am very curious.

www.rauchdesign.com