The art of the swatch

For more than 30 years, Fabriano mills’ swatch books were produced by the remarkable designer / printer Nicola D’Arcangelo, whose family printing business was based in nearby Pescara. Working in a design style that was uniquely his own – somewhere between Art Deco and Modernism– D’Arcangelo would create a visual theme (a flower, an artist’s palette) for a Fabriano paper brand. Using paper engineering and multi-coloured letterpress printing he would make tactile, three-dimensional swatch books achieved by precise die-cutting and intricate hand assembly in his printing shop. The examples shown here are preserved in the Foundation archive.