The Contemporary Relevance
of Historical Heritage

Founded in 2015 by Nicola-Matteo Munari, the Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire heritage of Italian graphic design.

Through the publication of monographic pages dedicated to projects, designers, firms, and companies the archive promotes Italian graphic design both enhancing its historical relevance and its contemporary role.

The website of the archive (link) immediately became a greatly appreciated source for students, scholars, professionals and design enthusiasts from all over the world, thus protecting and promoting an important cultural and artistic heritage by making it accessible to everyone.

The Website of the Archive

Designed in 2015 and officially launched in 2016, the website received numerous appreciation from all over the world, especially from students and design educators.

The graphic structure of the website is entirely based on a square-module grid, thus producing a rational and functional layout of the contents.

Despite the high number of pages, the website was designed and developed in one week only, without presenting the need of major changes during the following years, thus confirming the quality of the website’s design.

The Archival Criteria

The works published in the archive are organised by type, year, designer, firm and client and there is also the possibility to search projects by place, colour, style, theme, etc.

In this way, the website presents itself as an interactive platform offering freedom in experimenting multiple ways of searching the contents.

The Cultural Proposition

Contrary to the so called “inspirational websites,” the cultural proposition of the Archivio Grafica Italiana is also expressed in the original texts that introduce each work.

In addition to texts, which are all written specifically for the website, many images are also unseen on the internet.

In fact, thanks to a thorough research work, the archive contributed in giving light to unknown projects and unsung designers such as Pegge Hopper, Aldo Calabresi, René Martinelli, Pino Milàs, Costantino Nivola and many others, celebrating their talent and creativity.

A Growing Archive

To this day, the archive gathers more than 300 projects, 75 designers and 1.500 images offering a growing overview that goes from the 1930s up today.

Since its launch, the website has reached nearly 175.000 users with almost 1 million of pageviews, while its Facebook page reached 225.000 people in one day only.

Archivio Grafica Italiana has also been the subject of lessons at SCAD Hong Kong and LABA of Brescia and it was published in magazines (Internazionale, White), blogs (The Atlantic Re:Think, BrandNew, Curbed, Design Playground, FastCo.) and in academic studies.

—Nicola-Matteo Munari