Louise Fili presented her new book, Elegantissima, at the AIGA/NY Elegantissima The Design and Typography of Louise Fili with an introduction by Gail Anderson on Wednesday, September 29, 2012, at the Parsons The New School, Tishman Auditorium.

Gail Anderson introduced Louise Fili as “the most important designer of our times”, and as “a goddess of design.”

Fili showed examples of inspiration and highlighted selected projects from her book, Elegantissima, the first monograph which includes work from her nearly forty-year design career.

Fili shared that one of her favorite sources of inspiration is her archive of photographs of shop and restaurant signage from her travels to France and Italy. These photographs are organized by city in a meticulous system of binders in her design studio.

Another cherished source of inspiration is her collection of Italian orange wrappers. For every project, Fili stressed the importance of research, saying, “you have to research no matter what you do.”

Fili shared interesting back stories and lessons throughout her talk. One of her lessons for how to present to a client was to share an interesting nugget of information on your design process, “all clients like to be taught just a little something,” she added. Another lesson for ensuring quality work in design was to “spend 1% of the time designing and 99% making sure it doesn’t get f*cked up,” she said.

She highlighted numerous projects from Elegantissima, such as book covers, restaurant identities, packaging design, wine labels, corporate identities and posters. The last project she highlighted was designing a Love stamp for the United States Postal Service. The stamp design featured the word love created out of flowing ribbons. The project was both daughnting and exciting, “at 250 million impressions, the Love stamp was the largest print run I’ve ever designed,” said Fili.

The talk concluded with a book signing and delicious complementary gelato, courtesy of L’arte del Gelato.

Additional Information:
Buy Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili
Louise Fili Ltd.
Follow @LouiseFili

Event Details:
AIGA/NY Elegantissima The Design and Typography of Louise Fili With an Introduction by Gail Anderson

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