Eye Magazine

At the heart of Sara De Bondt’s identity design for last weekend’s Artissima art fair in Turin, Italy was a live publishing department which worked with real-time data connected to the event. When Eye editor John L. Walters interviewed De Bondt for Eye 80 (see ‘A certain smile’), she explained her approach to the project: ‘[Artissima is] in an old ice-skating rink – there’s a spectator booth for the commentator box where we will be constantly updating data … The statistics we’ll present in quite a few different styles, from Jeremy Dellar-style music maps to super-dry pie charts or bar diagrams, depending on the context.’

Top and bottom: The façade is a huge line graph that shows visitor (red) and gallery (green) numbers (1994-2011) and the number of curators (blue) employed by Artissima (1997-2011).

De Bondt decided on taking a statistic-led approach because although art fairs are based on imagery and artwork, for the identity ‘you can’t really show one artist’, displaying the data through blackboards (with plenty of coloured chalk), an LED sign (above), perspex panels (for percentages) and the exterior of the building itself. Statistics ranged from the sociological (‘the amount of artists coming from China’, for example) to the amusing (‘amount of dogs visiting’) to the plainly factual (average amount of artwork per stall; prices).

The live project was worked on by Sara De Bondt Studio: De Bondt, Mark El-khatib (above), Merel vanden Berg and Jamie Coull (intern) – with input from Antony Hudek.

Above and below: chalk diagrams.

Above and below: coloured perspex walls show percentages …

… with explanatory captions applied to the floor (below).

4 > 6 November 2011
Artissima: International Fair of Contemporary Art
Oval Lingotto Fiere
Turin, Italy
www.artissima.it

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop. The new issue, Eye 81 is on its way to subscribers and bookstores worldwide – see Eye Before You Buy for a visual sample.