10 Feb 2010
Article - 16.10.2006
Wordplay is at the heart of Sydney designer Suzanne Boccalatte’s award-winning design.
'What does your name mean?' is the question that designer Suzanne Boccalatte asks when I spell out the jumble of consonants and two lonely vowels that comprise my surname. The question of meaning had never really crossed my mind.
'My name means milk mouth,' she says. 'All names usually mean something.'
Semantics aside, the curious query is my first clue that for Boccalatte, design director of her eponymous Sydney design company, words are playthings and her graphic campaigns that are known for their crisp graphics and acid colours, wouldn’t be anywhere with out them. 'They say a picture is worth a 1000 words,' says Boccalatte, 42, when we meet at her office, an open loft space she shares with two architecture firms in Surry Hills. 'I think a word is worth a 1000 pictures.'
Her four-person design team has been playing with words and pictures since 1990 selling themselves with the slogan 'More than Mouth.' Arts organisations dominate Boccalatte’s client list, and she says her affinity with such projects comes from her training in the visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts and her own professional art practice. (Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and private collectors.) In recent years, her firm has created a number of fresh visual campaigns (often on shoestring budgets) including an award-winning campaign for Sydney Design Week - now known as Sydney Design ('It’s always scary doing something for a design audience,' she admits.) and a popular series of posters that double as brochures for Performance Space, a performing arts centre in Sydney’s inner city.
'Performance Space is a wonderful client because they let me play and I think that’s quite rare in graphic design,' she says. Boccalatte began to work with Performance Space in 2000 when they came to her looking for a logo. Her design, a lower case 'p' that doubles as an exclamation mark with the organisation’s name etched into the letter’s stem, is characteristic, playful, clean and simple but filled with multiple meanings and ideas. Playing with the idea of binaries and opposites – figure and ground, black and white, open and closed – the logo suggests that an action – a performance if you will – can change a space in exciting ways.
When creating the 2005 campaign for the organisation, Boccalatte returned to this theme of opposites to explore different meanings of 'performance' and 'space'. The results were four posters that double as brochures and are at once surreal and minimal, hallucinatory visions of supersaturated colour, married with straightforward sans serif text.
'I was playing with opposites,' says Boccalatte. People tend to think of performance as something that’s done inside and she wanted to turn that idea on its head and explore other ideas of space. So instead of performers on a stage, we see a plush toy monkey soar across the Mundi Mundi Plains, garish bowls of ceramic apples hover above dark Tasmanian grasses, and a decorative lawn chair rising into a dawn sky. Finally, a performer in a yellow shell suit joins the inanimate cast, coming into view against fluffy white clouds in a pretty blue sky. It’s a dreamlike sequence, both arresting and baffling. None of the dozens of performances and programs that are printed on the poster’s reverse (the double A4 poster becomes a six-fold brochure) are referenced, but the campaign as a whole captures the spirit of the organisation’s adventurous programming.
'They don’t ever want to favour one artist so we decided to have a poster that’s separate [from the program], one that just talks about performance and space,' she says. 'I wanted to take the idea of performance and space outside.' Hence the vast skies. 'But it’s more to do with vastness of performance and the idea that performance can be everywhere.'
Audience is another of Boccalatte’s concerns and preoccupations. She says, 'My work isn’t necessarily about other forms of graphic design and it’s not about fashion. It’s very much to do with audience and this series appeals to the audience that Performance Space is interested in because it’s about people reading messages and layers of meaning.' In its own mysterious way, using a logic all its own, the series told the Performance Space story.
'People collected these posters. One person told me they were looking forward to the next chapter in the story. I didn’t know there was a story,' says Boccalatte with a laugh. That said, Boccalatte admits that though she likes to tell stories, she doesn’t feel the need to control them. 'Once its out there its open to anyone’s interpretation.'
Boccalatte created the visual identity for Sydney Design in 2004, 2005 and 2006. You can also see her work for Performance Space in the new exhibition In your face: contemporary graphic design, 5 August-5 November at the Powerhouse Museum for Sydney Design 06.
Download Boccalatte's design portfolio (pdf)
Sydney Design 06
Boccalatte
Performance Space
TAGS
+ Sydney Design 06
+ In your face: contemporary graphic design
'My name means milk mouth,' she says. 'All names usually mean something.'
Semantics aside, the curious query is my first clue that for Boccalatte, design director of her eponymous Sydney design company, words are playthings and her graphic campaigns that are known for their crisp graphics and acid colours, wouldn’t be anywhere with out them. 'They say a picture is worth a 1000 words,' says Boccalatte, 42, when we meet at her office, an open loft space she shares with two architecture firms in Surry Hills. 'I think a word is worth a 1000 pictures.'
Her four-person design team has been playing with words and pictures since 1990 selling themselves with the slogan 'More than Mouth.' Arts organisations dominate Boccalatte’s client list, and she says her affinity with such projects comes from her training in the visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts and her own professional art practice. (Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and private collectors.) In recent years, her firm has created a number of fresh visual campaigns (often on shoestring budgets) including an award-winning campaign for Sydney Design Week - now known as Sydney Design ('It’s always scary doing something for a design audience,' she admits.) and a popular series of posters that double as brochures for Performance Space, a performing arts centre in Sydney’s inner city.
'Performance Space is a wonderful client because they let me play and I think that’s quite rare in graphic design,' she says. Boccalatte began to work with Performance Space in 2000 when they came to her looking for a logo. Her design, a lower case 'p' that doubles as an exclamation mark with the organisation’s name etched into the letter’s stem, is characteristic, playful, clean and simple but filled with multiple meanings and ideas. Playing with the idea of binaries and opposites – figure and ground, black and white, open and closed – the logo suggests that an action – a performance if you will – can change a space in exciting ways.
When creating the 2005 campaign for the organisation, Boccalatte returned to this theme of opposites to explore different meanings of 'performance' and 'space'. The results were four posters that double as brochures and are at once surreal and minimal, hallucinatory visions of supersaturated colour, married with straightforward sans serif text.
'I was playing with opposites,' says Boccalatte. People tend to think of performance as something that’s done inside and she wanted to turn that idea on its head and explore other ideas of space. So instead of performers on a stage, we see a plush toy monkey soar across the Mundi Mundi Plains, garish bowls of ceramic apples hover above dark Tasmanian grasses, and a decorative lawn chair rising into a dawn sky. Finally, a performer in a yellow shell suit joins the inanimate cast, coming into view against fluffy white clouds in a pretty blue sky. It’s a dreamlike sequence, both arresting and baffling. None of the dozens of performances and programs that are printed on the poster’s reverse (the double A4 poster becomes a six-fold brochure) are referenced, but the campaign as a whole captures the spirit of the organisation’s adventurous programming.
'They don’t ever want to favour one artist so we decided to have a poster that’s separate [from the program], one that just talks about performance and space,' she says. 'I wanted to take the idea of performance and space outside.' Hence the vast skies. 'But it’s more to do with vastness of performance and the idea that performance can be everywhere.'
Audience is another of Boccalatte’s concerns and preoccupations. She says, 'My work isn’t necessarily about other forms of graphic design and it’s not about fashion. It’s very much to do with audience and this series appeals to the audience that Performance Space is interested in because it’s about people reading messages and layers of meaning.' In its own mysterious way, using a logic all its own, the series told the Performance Space story.
'People collected these posters. One person told me they were looking forward to the next chapter in the story. I didn’t know there was a story,' says Boccalatte with a laugh. That said, Boccalatte admits that though she likes to tell stories, she doesn’t feel the need to control them. 'Once its out there its open to anyone’s interpretation.'
Boccalatte created the visual identity for Sydney Design in 2004, 2005 and 2006. You can also see her work for Performance Space in the new exhibition In your face: contemporary graphic design, 5 August-5 November at the Powerhouse Museum for Sydney Design 06.
Download Boccalatte's design portfolio (pdf)Sydney Design 06Boccalatte Performance Space TAGS
+ Sydney Design 06
+ In your face: contemporary graphic design