Rocco Punghellini

"Rocco is an Italian graphic designer based in London, whose work interrogates social and political mechanisms with irony. He completed his BA in Graphic Design* at Politecnico di Milano.

Cinema aficionado – even though the format has been slightly shifted this past year** – the realm of movies is a reference for his work and reflection.*** Always playing with voices and characters, Rocco’s aesthetic is timeless****, and takes the audience to an uncertain journey in his cynical world."

— Camille Le Flem

* Communication Design

** Enigmatic. I’m not sure I understood what she meant here…

*** True.

**** Mimetic

Collaborations

Co-author with Camille Le Flem and Maya Gulieva of the book Cold Swimmers, born within the unit Publishing as a Creative Practice, led by Adrian Shaughnessy, and crowdfunded in Summer 2020.

Website development for Export-Radio, an experimental radio station ideated and curated by Louise Gholam, Dougal Verinder-Gedge and Carmo Pinheiro de Melo, showcasing voices, soundscapes, and noises. Coded in collaboration with Max Kohler and Lola Li.

Website development for Affective Data by Camille Le Flem: a research to identify gaps in medical communication offering a speculative alternative to collect, archive, and communicate medical stories, from a designer perspective.

Part of the Visual Identity team for Terminal, the student-led Visual Communication graduate exhibition taking place in June 2021.

I come from a sense of confusion and disaffection generated by detaching myself from my practice, and I move towards making myself one with it.

In this mental space, the act of living is an unconscious, multi-layered, contradictory, and always-in-progress performance that drives me with its endless flow of conflicts and encounters. Here, the body returns to be the entry point and the main medium through which I communicate with others. The work instead, simply exists as an act of care and reflection towards the self, as a tool of survival.

Ultimately, technology is to culture as the designer is to the community. Both play at humanizing or mechanizing each other. This fatal attraction is a consequence to their common trauma, which is being asked to exist for someone else’s needs. So, in a way, somewhere under the skin, being a designer is flirting with technology, to recognize yourself otherwise.

In contrast to the concept of designer-savior, I recognize myself as a designer-listener, who becomes a designer-performer. A designer-listener is a mimetic creature. A designer-performer is a vulnerable, organic medium, who challenges the boundaries of individualism aiming for the common good. And if the designer’s perspective becomes pivotal, to what extent can its work be accessible to and reusable by a larger audience? And what role should the audience play?

A small disclaimer

DVX is a transmedial work that exists in-between the field of design and visual arts, where the public responsibility of the visual communicator meets the individual, through an introspective approach.

Here, by expanding the notion of visual design to the one of mimetic design, I have created the space for an encounter with the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Born with the intention of becoming a methodological proposal for what I define as introspective design, DVX has slowly transformed itself into a reconciliation process with my past.

Follow the journey here.

Advert for ReliaRocco™

Backstage[1]

Animated poster

Backstage[2]

An average day for ReliaRocco™

Backstage[3]

Launch Project

Social media poster

From the website:

“ReliaRocco™ is a web service born in January 2021 to quantify the reliability of Rocco Punghellini.

In this unique, deeply customized, 100% free, and human-oriented service the customer can ask for any support through our chat, and Rocco will be happy to discuss and solve their issue.

The service does not use chatbots and is active from Monday to Sunday, 24h.”

Try it at reliarocco.altervista.org and rate it in the Trustpilot page.

Or if you want to know more about the motivations and the struggles behind this project, you can take a look here.

Dystopias Experimental Design Fiction Human Centered Design Identity Post-work U/Dys:topia

Banner [1] - by William Jacobson

Banner [2]

Events line-up posters

"TERMINAL is not where; it’s when. It unpacks the broader questions when brought on. When everything is unmoving, uncertain and unprecedented, how do we change, create, grow? When in isolation energy is a limited resource, what can we afford to create? When art is deemed non-essential, how can sacrifices and compromises inform new values in the work we take into the post-Covid world — what is essential?"

A grid

A vital space

A method for looking

A method for making

A visual trip from ASCII to Rietveld in collaboration with:

William Jacobson

Dougal Verinder-Gedge

Nayonika Ghosh

This visual identity is part of TERMINAL, the Visual Communication Satellite Event for RCA2021 open to the public from the 27th to the 30th June (10am -10pm), at Ugly Duck (Tanner Street) London.

More information on @terminal_rca or on our Facebook page TERMINAL RCA.

exhibition Graphic Design Poster Typography Visual Identity

Rocco Punghellini

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About

Royal College of Art