Packaging

Global Design in Burundi

Italbu-01

Anyone who doubts that we live in a global economy needs to look at packaging and products from the far-flung reaches of the planet. These lovely labels for sauces and marmalades were made for Italbu Charcuterie in Burundi, a little landlocked country in Southeast Africa, bordered by Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Italbu Charcuterie is a deli shop offering organic products made from original Italian recipes.The design firm Ya Ye lists studios both in Zagreb, Croatia, and Bujumbura, Burundi. Ya Ye’s design has a contemporary universal quality that could have just as easily been produced in New York, London or Sydney. Cultural design differences were more distinctly identifiable before air travel and multinational retailers. A World War II vet once told me that if a soldier was parachuted onto foreign terrain, he would know where he landed by the typography and architecture, even before hearing the spoken language. With the Internet today, the whole world is exposed to the same visual references and design styles can’t be pinpointed to a particular culture or part of the world.

Architecture

Wicker Architecture and Cardboard Signs

The wicker basket façade of the Spanish Pavilion, designed by Barcelona-based architects MiralleTagliabue EMBT, for the 2010 Shanghai Expo has appropriately garnered awards and accolades—to the point where the cardboard signage system inside has not attracted much media attention, which it also deserves.

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Design Quizzes

Quiz: MoMA’s Newest Type Acquisitions

This January type fonts earned long overdue recognition as “designed objects” when the renowned Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired 23 digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection. Except for its acquisition of Helvetica, this is the first time typefaces made it into MoMA’s permanent collection.

This quiz is to see if you can name the 23 faces inducted into the MoMA permanent collection — and three more classic faces we added just to round out the alphabet. To help you along, we included a clue alongside the font letter, and can tell you that the type designers chosen for the MoMA collection are Wim Crouwel, Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, Zuzana Licko, Jeffery Keedy, Erik van Blokland, Just van Rossum, Barry Deck, P. Scott Makela, Jonathan Hoefler, Neville Brody, Jonathan Barnbrook, Tobias Frere-Jones, and Albert-Jan Pool. Good luck! (Answers on next page.)

MoMA Type Quiz
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