Alessandro Segalini

For years, I've recommended to students that they study Communication, that it is one of the most important skills they can acquire: to learn how to ask a client about their business, how to listen to the replies and then refine the questions, how to enlighten a client about what the client needs to know about what we do. That last part is almost like educating kids about where babies come from… You only have to give the answer that makes sense at the level of understanding of the person asking the question.

Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy. Searching is everything — going beyond what you know.

To design is to plan and organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man's thinking and doing.

The newspaper in mid-nineteenth century can be seen as a part of a fast growing, visually oriented print culture that rapidly changed the visual field. To understand its influence, it is crucial that the newspaper should not only be seen as a textual phenomenon, as the site of journalistic writing, but also be recognized as a visual phenomenon characterized by experiments in layout and typography. On a single page, different headlines, fonts, and font sizes could be seen, and a variety of brief pieces of prose, without any apparent connection, were presented to the reader. This fragmented form gave rise to a new mode of reading; linear reading was now abandoned in favor of discontinuous reading, browsing, and zapping on the page. Just as the flâneur let his gaze flicker in the street, the newspaper reader let his gaze flicker over the newspaper page.
What is interesting is that the aesthetics of the modern newspaper resemble, to a certain extent, modernist aesthetics. The juxtaposition of texts that have no apparent connection is based on the same principle that will later be crucial to the avant-garde: montage. The montage of the nineteenth century newspaper precedes the collages of Picasso and Braque, as well as the montages of avant-garde film. Furthermore, the typographical exploration of the newspaper page parallels the poetic exploration of the white space of the book page. The ultimate reference here is Stéphane Mallarmé, who scattered words all over the page in his poem ‘Un coup de dés’ (‘A Throw of the Dice’) (1897), using a variety of fonts and sizes. This pioneering poetic work should be seen in relation to Mallarmé’s experiments with typography and layout in the one-man journal ‘La Dernière Mode: Gazette du Monde et de la Famille’ (‘The Latest Fashion: A Gazette of High Society and of the Family’) in 1874. Presumably, his experience with the white surface of the newspaper page had an impact on his later typographical experiments as a poet.

When told the reason for daylight savings time, the old Aboriginal elder said; ‘Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.’

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Drawing (and painting) are used to communicate ideas, express fears, hopes and desires, demonstrate an awareness of the physical world to others and celebrate the beauty of the natural and spiritual world we live in. In addition art has many practical applications and is considered an essential skill for architects, engineers, designers, draftsmen and computer scientists. Since the time of Pestalozzi, drawing for children came to be viewed as a developmental activity closely related to the activity of handwriting, each discipline informing and enhancing the other. From the Renaissance on students learned drawing by copying the work of masters and only in the advanced stages of one’s art education was life drawing introduced. However in the modern, progressive school children are encouraged to draw from life early on, when handwriting is first learned. In addition, teachers use drawing and painting to introduce children to elementary mathematics through symmetry studies. These disciplines offer experiences that can assist children in learning to analyze, understand and demonstrate knowledge about space and about themselves and their life in Universe.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.

The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of ‘depth’ is overestimated.