Based in Rovigo in northern Italy, IDA is a design studio with a strong sense of its own identity. Designed in an appealing set of grey, blue and orange hues, the studio’s new business cards make use of a series of patterns of lines and dots.
Yet there’s more to the cards than meets the eye. Designer Laura Bortoloni says that the designs follow on from the studio’s logo, which features two distinct dots that ‘can stay close or scattered at the corners of the work’ when used across the studio’s self-promotional campaign, its website and business cards. ‘One dot is just a simple black circle, while the other dot has up to nine beams, actually “dividing” the space into ten areas,’ Bortoloni explains.
‘In this way we tried to reflect upon the designer’s role as a sort of contemporary “cartographer”, a metaphor we love deeply,’ she continues, ‘as early cartographers were designing a representation of the same space they were discovering, trying to make sense of something they were immersed in.’ The design of the cards references the same idea – ‘exposing the structure and the grid we use to understand any place, even an 8.5×5.5cm paper cut-out’.
Bortoloni says the studio chose Sirio paper because of ‘the desaturated nuance of the material, reminding us of the colours of water and earth on ancient atlases’. A small print run meant that the studio chose to print the cards digitally.
Paper: Sirio