Promoting a Culture of Quality

Founded by Nicola-Matteo Munari in 2003, Designculture is a website conceived to promote a ‘culture of quality’ in design, through the publication of essays and interviews dedicated to both past and contemporary designers—both industrial designers and graphic designers, but also architects.

The website is considered to be an important source for the understanding of design’s fundamental principles and because of its contribution to design culture it received appreciation by professionals, scholars and design educators from all over the world.

Speaking the Words
of the Masters

Originally designed in 2010, the website was officially launched three years later with what was going to be the last interview of Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014)—the first one of the interviews dedicated to the great masters of the 20th century, including Dieter Rams, Wim Crouwel, Cini Boeri, Ivan Chermayeff, Armin Hofmann, and many others.

The design of the website was developed without any stylistic goal in mind, but with the sole purpose of being clear and functional to the reading of texts and enjoying of contents.

The Design of the Website

The publication of interviews made with designers working in the three basic fields of design—architecture, product and graphics—emphasises the so called multi-disciplinary nature of design with the intention of promoting a wider understanding of the design discipline itself.

For this purpose, no distinction was made between these different fields, so all the pages in the website share the same layout and the same typefaces.

Only two typefaces have been used for the texts, thus producing a consistent identity for the website and visual consistency through the pages.

The Publication

The publication of Designculture—which is offered completely free and made without funding—constitutes a sort of publishing and editorial laboratory.

Initially published in many languages and updated twice a week, the website is always changing and evolving. New contents are published on a free basis and texts and images are reviewed, changed and edited multiple times.

In 2015 a major redesign was made by completely rethinking the structure of the layout and also updating all the contents.

A Cultural Resource

The websites has received numerous appreciations, enjoys an international reputation in the design community and, since its launch, it reached nearly 300.000 unique users from all over the world with almost 1 million of pageviews.

Both interviews and original texts published by Designculture have been quoted in blogs (Graphic Arts), national newspapers (Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Fatto Quotidiano), academic papers, and in the books ‘Design for the Corporate World’ (Lund Humphries, 2017), ‘The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design’ (Harry N. Abrams, 2018), and ‘Graphic Design Between Creativity and Science’ (Gangemi, 2018).

The project was also discussed in lectures given to New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA), SCAD of Hong Kong, and the University of New Haven, among others.

—Nicola-Matteo Munari