While the once widespread culture of cartoons recedes--taking
funny ashtrays, ceramic cartoon figures, and celebrities like Al Capp
and Walt Kelly with it--its playful influence continues to extend
into design. Witness Alessi, maker of the devilishly grinning bottle opener
and happy floss dispenser whose functions are as unexpected as a good
punchline. Now the firm has sponsored the first issue of the new Italian
magazine Due. Subtitled "Cuteness and Complexity," the publication
began, art director Igor Tuveri explains, "from observing, even in
an ironical way, that what is derived from comics is more important than
the comics themselves." But Due is not a critical magazine. "In
general, I like pop culture," Tuveri says. "I am not here to
judge--I'm just looking." To this end Tuveri and his three
partners, all of whom have designed for Alessi, created Due as an ongoing
forum to chronicle some of the effects of cartoons' influence on
design, art, and merchandising. The scope of the first issue--from
Princess Mononoke to Marc Newson to Jake and Dinos Chapman--is a good
example. At the magazine's conceptual center is an atlas of Japanese
comic characters, displaying the medium's multiple variations in
form and style as well as its basic principle of "not physically
accepting how [people] are." No character names are given, only the
names of the artists, spotlighting the talent behind icons whose commercial
use frequently eclipses the visual impact of the drawings themselves.
At 255 digest-size (41Ú2-by-6-inch) pages, Due itself
is a deceptively simple design object. And the further one reads--traversing
complexity theory and teddy bears--the clearer its intent becomes.
Maintaining the inspiration while designing from it, Due balances imagination
with commercialization, cuteness with complexity.
