Creating eye-catching graphic designs for powerful advertising campaigns can be difficult, but creating timeless and iconic visuals is creatively challenging, even though it is not impossible, as proved by the works of Sardinian painter and graphic designer Giovanni Pintori.
Born in 1912 in Tresnuraghes in the province of Oristano, Sardinia, in 1937, after his studies in Monza, he started collaborating with Olivetti's Advertising Office (where also artist and sculptor Costantino Nivola worked) and, four years later, he became its director. Pintori produced for Olivetti a variety of promotional materials, from brochures and posters to outdoors billboards and shop signs, adverts and the marketing materials for fairs and events.
The '50s were a glorious decade for Pintori: the graphic designer became Olivetti's Art Director, won several awards and, in 1952, New York's MoMa organized the exhibition "Olivetti: Design in Industry" where Pintori's works were acclaimed. The following year he became a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) that dedicated an entire room of an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris to his designs for Olivetti.
More exhibitions like the one in Tokyo (1966) and prizes like the Typographic Excellence Award (1964) by New York's Type Directors Club, followed during the next decade and, in 1967, Pintori moved to work with other companies, including Pirelli. Pintori died in 1999 and dedicated the last period of his life to painting.
He is mainly remembered for his graphic works and advertising campaigns that turned him into an inspiration and an influence for other international iconic designers, including Paul Rand, all of them fascinated by Pintori's immediate and innovative graphic designs that still retained a strong arty quality about them.
Pintori's secret was focusing on three main aspects in his adverts - photography, illustration and language/message - interpreted in his trademark sober and elegant style to make sure that the brand was easily recognizable.
By perfectly balancing these three aspects, his designs acquired a sort of added value and an intrinsic symbolism: the illustration representing a woman carrying a Lettera 22 typewriter and some presents hinted at the fact that the machine would have been a great Christmas present; another poster showing a man carrying a case with a variety of tools meant that the company's assistance service was excellent and the poster of a man in a suit with a typewriter in his pocket indicated that the product was a must for professionals.
His graphic design accompanied the advertising campaigns of iconic products such as the Lexikon 80 and Lettera 22 typing machines or the Tetracty calculators. In some cases like a 1949 advert for calculators featuring just coloured numbers on a black background with the name of the brand in the centre, the product wasn't even featured.
In others the poster hinted at higher metaphors: the 1952 "rose in the inkwell" advert the Studio 44 typewriter moved from a 1938 image by Leonardo Sinisgalli, Nivola and Pintori, and the rose blooming in the inkwell represented the development of handwriting and the innovations introduced by the typewriter.
In the catalogue accompanying Olivetti's exhibition at MoMa, Pintori stated that "a page or a poster must be rich in significance (...) its meaning must drive from the inherent qualities of the object or of the function to be publicized". This principle accompanied him throughout his career: though Pintori was creating adverts to sell a product, their emphasis on imaginative pictorial symbols, strong aesthetic concept, and high design standard combined with a playful and decorative twist, allowed him indeed to preserve his personality and vision even in promotional materials.
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