Louise Fili’s typography

While I was researching revivalism in typography, I realised that Louise Fili is one of the most important designers in this area. Her passion for letters, according to her biographer, started at the age of four years old (Martin, 2016) which set in motion a prolific career with thousands of book designs to her credit. Fili’s work is also historically important because it generated an original retro style especially in the early 20^th-century Italian, a cultural foundation that influenced her style in profound ways. Her revivalism has had a strong influence on the current design industry and there are so many Fili-esque (resembling) designs in the commercial field today.

I tried to analyse her design’s popularity via four interrelated assertion, they are:

1) The Roaring Twenties – or 1920s denotes a high period of her work and corresponds to one of the most glorious time of culture and design with the advent and global rise of Art Déco and Jazz music. It was during this inter-war period that culture of that time had contradictory messages embedded in imagery which promoted affluence and nationalism and egalitarianism and peace.

2) Many of the organic shapes and colours that she originally made by hand – especially for the food industry would become their signature logo and thus brand. Many of the companies desired images for their food that is authentic, of a good quality, safe, delicious and fashionable, and her design represented those values.

3) Her typography’s warm inviting connotations are very different from our computer-based design today, and we are in need of more organic and modernist practices in our digital age.

4) Her exquisite aesthetic and the elegant feel of her designs exemplifies over her distinguished career life and career, if we borrow the phrase from the ‘How Graphic Design Legend Louise Fili Became “The Envy of Every Designer” (ibid.) seems to encapsulate her profound influence on designers for more than 90 years.

Fig. 1 Fili’s works for the food industry

From the all those reasons I assumed above, she has fame clearly different from others. The number of her works and clients means the popularity of her retro style, and that itself might be a proof of the meaning of the existence of revival typography in the present.

Fig.2 Fili’s book design about food

Bibliography:

Martin, S. (2016) ‘How Graphic Design Legend Louise Fili Became “The Envy of Every Designer”’. Ceros [Online] December 2016. Available from: https://www.ceros.com/blog/design-legend-louise-fili/