Work / Poster Design, Brand Identity, Web Design, Graphic Design
Genesis Lectures: brand and web design for an architecture lecture series
Brand, posters and website for Genesis Lectures, Pisa University's annual architecture lecture series exploring how design ideas are born, protected, and transformed — a new visual identity for each of the five editions, from 2016 to 2020.
Context
Genesis organizes an annual series of architecture lectures at Pisa University, each year built around a shared inquiry: the genesis of the architectural process. The uniqueness of a design’s genesis is bound to a moment of intuition that often strikes like lightning in the storm of our thoughts — a matter of timing, of seizing the day. What follows is even more interesting: how much do you protect and safeguard that first idea? How much do you tweak, revise, or revolutionize it? The genesis of a design is complex, challenging, and extraordinarily powerful — the very first step an architect takes in shaping space. Genesis Lectures is built to ask, publicly, three questions: How does a project begin? How much should you modify or protect the initial idea? When do you stop?
5 visual identities for one core idea
I handled the graphics, communication and website for Genesis Lectures from 2016 to 2020, across all five editions. One idea sits under all of them, the same one the lectures themselves ask about: the genesis of a design idea. Each year took that concept somewhere else visually — type, colour and imagery redrawn from scratch every time. The only fixed element was the logo, which had to hold the series together while everything around it changed.
2016 edition
The series opened with four guests — Tony Fretton (1 April), Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra (15 April), Ricardo Bak Gordon (29 April) and Dietmar Eberle (6 May). A fifth lecture, with Dominique Perrault, never took place.
2017 edition
Sou Fujimoto (3 March), TAMassociati (21 April) and Elisa Valero Ramos (12 May) were the year’s guests.
2018 edition
Three architecture firms were the year’s guests — Durisch + Nolli (13 April), Robbrecht en Daem (4 May), and Carmody Groarke (18 May).
2019 edition
Massimo Carmassi (8 March), ARX Portugal (3 May) and Vector Architects (10 May) were the year’s guests. The website expanded to feature pictures from past conferences alongside biographies, photos and drawings from the guest architects’ most significant projects. Illustrator Giuseppe Tambellini drew all the guest portraits for this edition, giving each speaker a consistent, hand-drawn presence across posters and site.
2020 edition
noa*, Bergmeisterwolf and Room11 Architects were announced for the fifth edition, which was postponed as the COVID-19 emergency began.
Highlights
- 5 editions, 2016 to 2020
- 16 architecture studios
- 2,000+ participants
Participants ranged from university students and citizens to practising professionals, who were awarded training credits recognized by the Order of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects, and Conservationists of the Province of Pisa.