This series of four advertisements that were designed for UniFor has been originally conceived for the publication on Domus—one of the most important architecture magazines in the world—before it was approached the redesign of the company’s trademark and the development of its corporate identity program.

The ads illustrate products and projects made by UniFor—one of the most prestigious companies in the field of workspaces—including some of the best-known projects by internationally acclaimed architects and firms, such as Axel Springer Neubau by OMA—a project that later evolved in the series Principles.

Once designed for a long time by Pierluigi Cerri (1939–2022)—an architect, art director, and one of the most respected graphic designers in Italy—the ads of UniFor have been always characterised by a sense of understated elegance and uncompromising formal rigour, consistently with the identity of UniFor.

A new advertising format was purposely designed for these new ads, showing a rigorous formal order. The title of the project and the name of the designer are positioned on the top left corner. The names of art directors, graphic designer, and photographer are placed on the top right corner. The website address and hashtags are on the bottom left. While the logo is on the bottom right.

All texts are set in a very small body size—like if they were captions—and carefully positioned along the margins, thus developing a graphic solution that is at the same time understated and refined, giving a strong visual presence to the large photographs (32.5 cm in height by 49 cm in width).

The small size of the margins, through the positioning of texts and trademark, generates a firm visual tension in the composition, that looks extremely simple but is very effective and versatile, being easily adaptable to any page format, on single or double page of both print and digital magazines.

The success of the advertising design has been confirmed by its evolution into the second series of ads for UniFor, that allowed to rationalise these early experiments and calibrated with great care every detail.

—Nicola-Matteo Munari