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Portrait of Xavier Bas.

5 min minutes
Pulp 02Stories

Sensation and memories

For Catalan designer Xavier Bas, paper has an evocative power that complements branding and design. Interview by Saul Montes
Graphic designInterviewsPackagingPrinting

Portrait of Xavier Bas.

Label from Imaginative Colours for Arconvert printed two-colour offset, silkscreened in white and blind embossed.
The Manter visual book Imaginative Colours for Arconvert is printed using a multiplicity of printing techniques on Savile Row Tweed Dark Grey 100gsm, Golden Star K Extra White 140gsm and Ispira Marrone Mistero 360gsm.
Bas designed catalogues for wool carpet designer Nani Marquina using cotton and recycled papers to associate them with the warmth and quality of her work.

‘A Ferrari is the only real luxury nowadays,’ jokes Spanish designer Xavier Bas when asked about his work for wineries, exclusive design firms or paper manufacturers. ‘New printing processes have taken luxury finishes to a greater range of premium brands, so it is down to the quality of the product and the quality of the design,’ he says. And Bas’s designs have demonstrated such qualities from the beginning.

After graduating from ELISAVA (Barcelona School of Engineering and Design) in 1983, Bas began his career by working on projects for museums with Catalan designer Enric Franch. In 1992, he joined Summa Comunicació, a multidisciplinary agency (inspired by Pentagram), which would become one of the cornerstones of the design boom that coincided with the Barcelona Olympic Games.

Working closely with celebrated designers such as Mario Eskenazi and Josep María Mir, Bas developed distinctive projects like the image for the new port of the city ‘Port Vell’. However he disdains the word ‘boom’ to describe that time. ‘The Olympics were important because they gave us visibility, but it wasn’t an overnight success,’ says Bas. ‘Catalonia had a strong industrial tradition forged in the nineteenth century, plenty of designers to serve it, and of course design schools. The difference was that the world was suddenly looking at us.’

Bas opened his own studio, Xavier Bas Disseny, in 1998 with just one big client: the printer manufacturer Hewlett Packard. ‘This contract allowed me to take some other low-fee projects,’ he says. One client was carpet-maker and designer Nani Marquina. Though today her rugs can be seen at MoMA in New York, and on the floors of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the work was then little known. Bas turned her name into a logotype – Nanimarquina – and made a 2002 catalogue that showed and explained the production process for her work.

‘We used coated paper for that catalogue, because at that time the quality of the pictures was more important than the feel of the paper,’ he says. However that was all about to change: ‘Paper itself was about to become a powerful communication tool. Catalogues printed on cotton or recycled papers became associated with values such as “natural”, “warm” or “quality”.’ This is something that Bas has incorporated into subsequent projects.

His interest in and expertise with paper has meant that he was selected as one of the jurors for Fedrigoni’s TOP Awards jury, alongside Ginette Caron (Milan), Joost Grootens (Amsterdam), Pulp’s Simon Esterson (London) and Massimo Acanfora (Conran, London).

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Featured Materials

Cotone

The Cotone range includes treefree papers with a precious felt-marked texture a different nuances including black pulp-dyed versions, which make it one of the must-have self-adhesive papers preferred by label designers all over the world.

Tintoretto

The uncoated natural papers in the Tintoretto range are made from pure ecological ECF cellulose, FSC™ certified, and felt-marked.

Ispira

Environmentally-friendly ECF papers and boards FSC® certified. The special soft touch finish on the surface allows a pleasant effect and high printing performances. The 120 gsm is only one-side treated.

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Inspiration 31/05/2022

From sketch to catwalk

To make an opulent photobook, Gérard Uféras went behind the scenes at Dior. By Jean Grogan
Graphic designPhotographyPublishing

In Pulp 02

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