A Roman Heart And Mind Designer

Italian native graphic artist Claudia Neri creates evocative and innovative work

Claudia Neri may have left Rome, but Rome has not left her.
The work of the Toronto graphic designer is infused with lessons learned in the great city, where she was born and raised. Chief among them is that if one produces creative work, it had better be good. "You can't get much more perfect than Rome," says Neri, sitting down to an interview in her modest fourth floor office in a building at the edge of Toronto's Chinatown. "Whatever you add better be amazing, because it's going to be standing next to the most amazing art that the Western world has been able to produce," the designer says. Rome is also a humbling backdrop for a young designer, she says. "You don't have this arrogance to think that you're creating a brand new thing. In Rome, you're aware that everything has been invented. It's an old world."
Graphic design is a hybrid of art and commerce, a profession that is as much about positioning a client and their product as it is about an aesthetic presentation. Working under the company name Teikna Design, Neri directs graphic design programs for products, brands and events for clients such as the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Design Exchange and contract furniture manufacturer Nienkamper.
She often collaborates with Toronto photographer Evan Dion to create strong images for clients. In a recent project for European office furniture manufacturer Sitag (distributed in Canada by Inscape), Neri and Dion worked together on a series of images that reflected a typical office workspace, full of stacks of paper. For Neri, this imagery rings truer than common product brochures which feature pristine offices with a few carefully placed accessories. "I'm an extremist," Neri says of her design approach. "I like either full reality or fantasy."
Fantasy was the option for a series of images for a seating series by Toronto furniture manufacturer Nienkamper. Neri likes to convey a narrative through her use of images and for the company's Wavelength seating line she and Dion created product shots which suggest the glamour and romance of a fine hotel. A casegoods series by Nienkamper was given a similar fantasy treatment - transparent human figures become props for the office furniture in a series of brochure images directed by Neri.
Neri arrived in Toronto in 1996 and some aspects of North American culture are still a pleasing novelty to her. A visit to Mississauga is "like a trip to Disneyland," she says. While many Canadians like their open spaces, no one would accuse Neri of living large. Conditioned by a European mentality, she lives in a small apartment and drives a small car. She even likes her espresso short. The lifestyle choice extends to her work. Since 1998 she has produced a floppy disk-sized desktop calendar for the Istituto Italiano di Cultura which demonstrates Neri's design ability to do more with less. She likes small objects and says they are "more respectful" of the reality of finite space and resources - a reality often lost on North American consumer culture. "If you're good at what you do, you don't need a lot of space," she says of effective graphic design. Working with space-related and budgetary restrictions and turning them to an advantage has become a common thread in her work.
Neri's list of influences includes Italian minimalist designer AG Fronzoni (who passed away just last year), early 20th century German photographic artist Karl Blossfeldt and avant-garde graphic designers Tibor Kalman and Stefan Sagmeister. A travelogue by a young photojournalist killed in Somalia inspired Neri to re-visit scrapbooks she had been compiling since the early 1990s. She collects ephemera such as vintage post cards and calligraphy and imagery pulled from these sources can find their way into her work through a kind of Dadaist approach. The scrapbooks are also a means to work without computer software, which Neri says, although a boon for designers, can also foster a negative trend towards creative uniformity throughout the international design community.
The Toronto designer is currently working on a graphics identity program for a fall exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Neri's long-term goals include producing books based on her own ideas and she already has some experience with the medium. She provided the graphic design direction for San Francisco publisher Chronicle Books' 2002 cookbook title, Mix It Up ( which had a print run of one million) and she has helped Evan Dion with two self-published books based on the photographer's travels to Venice and Cuba.
Her Roman background has also taught her that trying to please everyone is a futile goal. "If you try to be too many things to too many people, you're destined to fail," Neri says. "I believe in saying one thing and saying it well," she says of her design approach. She employs typographical layout techniques such as logica degli allineamenti and rigore strutturale, but says these methods should be invisible to a viewer for a design to be truly effective.
Although she employs methodologies in her work, Neri is equally wary of following efficient formulae which can thwart creativity. Her evocative designs belie the tireless work that is often required to create the intended impressions. As Neri says, "I struggle for effortlessness."

Publication Date: 2003-03-30
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2548