graphic.elisava are three advanced master programmes to deepen your knowledge in graphic design, specialize in editorial design or discover the power of data and design. Guided by our outstanding faculty you'll live an inspiring and stimulating one-year learning experience in Barcelona.

Observe, Collect, Draw: Documenting the world using data
As a designer and artist, I use data-gathering and data-visualisation as a design process, taking seemingly ‘cold’ data and using it to communicate warmer, more subjective messages.

I’ll highlight the various esoteric and ‘outsider’ data collection processes and data visualisations that have inspired me to see observation as a form of making/creating, exploring how it both influences my creative practice and also functions as a starting point for making the concept of data more accessible to a wider audience, showing how in an era of ever-increasing data, we all can – through channelling our inner 'anoraks’ – start to view data through a warmer, more human-focused lens.

Stefanie Posavec
is a designer and artist for whom data is her favoured material, with projects ranging from data visualization, book design, and information design to artworks. Her work has been exhibited at the MoMA (New York), CCBB (Rio de Janeiro), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the V&A, the Design Museum, and Somerset House (London), and is held in the permanent collection of the MoMA. Her books (co-authored with Giorgia Lupi) include Dear Data and their new journal Observe, Collect, Draw!

stefanieposavec.com
dear-data.com

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Souvenir
“Recently organising the things in my archive, I found a letter I’d written to myself on the plane back from New York to Seoul. I’d heard about this special service that sends letters you write on the airplane, and I decided to try it out. That kind of thing happens sometimes, where I have a weird curiosity and put it into practice. I’d forgotten all about it, and then I found the letter.

You know how when you write a letter to yourself, you tend to write some pretty embarrassing things, like in a diary? I thought it would be like that, but it wasn’t. (...)”

Na Kim
worked as a graphic designer at the very heart of the small-scale but prolific design studios that became an established trend in Seoul from the mid 2000s. And as an artist, she’s taken part in numerous exhibitions at major art museums and galleries in her home country. Boldly yet naturally crossing the boundary between design and art, she’s provided young Korean creators with a new role model. 

After studying industrial and visual design in Korea, Kim left to study in the Netherlands at Werkplaats Typografie, where she produced experimental works of design, such as her independent magazine umool umool. She was also chief editor and art director of another magazine in Amsterdam, called Graphic, which is still mentioned today as a kind of textbook for many designers. Returning to Seoul in 2012, Kim expanded the scope of her avant-garde activities, deploying original style like a weapon.

She founded Table Union, a design studio also serving as a new creative platform. At the same time, she has continuously worked as a graphic designer collaborating with various artists and institutions, as an art director crafting spaces for different brands, and as a teacher of university students. Recently she has been presenting different variations with her ‘SET’ wall art series, taking as her reference the book SET, a collection of design elements from the artist’s work.

Here, one can discover many insights into an artist who obsessively collects pretty things from the world around her, categorises them, and mixes them back together to build her own unique language.
(Text by Jae Seok Kim)

ynkim.com

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Bas Jacobs
Born in the Netherlands, where he still lives today. Received his typographic education in the nineties in England and the Netherlands. Since 1999 his time is exclusively devoted to improving the world one typeface at a time with his companions at the pan-European type foundry Underware. Not willing to accept limitations easily. Still dreams about brain-to-brain communication. Interested in languages. And dialects. And slang. And script. And alphabets. And type. Checks email manually.

Joancarles Casasín
Born in Barcelona, from where escaped a few years ago. He started his interest in digital typography in the early nineties and since 2005 his work is exclusively devoted to custom type design and font production.
Self-taught, writes small tools to make his and other's life easier and exciting and to flee from the software’s dictatorship.
Checks email manually.

Only recently it has become clear that from now on type designers aren’t any longer just designing outlines of fonts, but are mostly designing relations between outlines of fonts. Therefore interpolation will become increasingly relevant in the future of type design, and will logically be an essential aspect within this workshop.

During this workshop we’re not only going to explore the design of letters (hands-on), but also explore the space in which those letters relate to each other (brains-on). Designing the design, as well as designing the design space these designs live in. And that – well… if everything works out – leads to another, innovative way of looking at your design.

Desisto is an independent multidisciplinary platform established in 2013 by Margarida Borges and Ricardo Martins. In 2015, the platform started to operate also as a graphic design studio and welcomed José Mendes. From self-initiated projects to cultural and commercial commissions, Desisto’s work encompasses visual identity, branding, editorial projects, exhibition design and webdesign, with a particular focus on typography and production.

«It’s important for us to share knowledge in a structure of values with which we identify ourselves with.»
Margarida Borges
Desisto

Posters for agitation
The poster as a communication tool. The graphic designer with critical thinking, looking for problems, at the service of society, satirical, provocative and that makes us think about how the world could be. The posterist as a mass agitator. The poster artist in search of graphic excellence. In this workshop we worked on the positioning of the future designer and his social role as a message issuer.

We worked from the word towards the graphic expression of the idea using, exploring and experimenting with the resources of graphic design to project a message in the public space.