Ten years ago we made history. On paper, anyway. Fedrigoni commissioned the London-based team behind Eye magazine to create the very first issue of Pulp, the journal of people and paper that is now one of the highest circulation design magazines in Europe. After a visit to the Verona mills to meet some of the people behind the paper, we decided to kick off the first edition with a section focusing on digital printing. Pulp returned to this hot topic in 2021 with issue 20, the digital printing issue [speciale stampa digitale]. The first ever ‘People and paper’ article is an interview with archivist Rino Maccaccaro, a third-generation Fedrigoni employee who had worked for the paper company since 1954. Mr Maccaccaro showed us some paper samples and other artefacts from the Verona archive, including a wallpaper ‘recipe’, some custom-made watermark wire frames and many colourful specimen books.
Pulp 01 also featured an interview with Bryan Edmondson, founder of the London studio SEA, whose clients then included the Mental Health Foundation, Monotype and Fedrigoni. SEA had recently designed The Art of Color, a tactile Sirio specimen. Other subjects included the great Italian designer Italo Lupi, whose Graphic autobiography [Autobiografia grafica] had just been published; Golden Meaning, an ingenious creative project from Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright’s GraphicDesign&; and witty illustrator Beppe Giacobbe. The edition was rounded out, literally, by Mucho’s limited-edition silkscreen poster for a documentary about Barcelona’s electronic music scene: 150 unique variations printed on Splendorlux Mirror with the aid of a giant ‘turntable’.
Ten years on, every article in the launch issue – now out of print – has now been published online, on our happy tenth anniversary, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!
To request Pulp journal for your studio or company, or buy limited-edition back issues, click here.