Visual Pollution
BA (Hons) Graphic Design Third Year
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.
Joint forces with Chris Kieling
Set Brief 3 - Joshua Trees, Free Criticism
Read about it


Aim of this brief set by Joshua Trees and intended to be part of the series of talks named ‘Free Criticism’ was to design and deliver a lecture on contemporary themes relevant to designers’ practice. Me and Chris Kieling teamed up for this project, having worked together in the past already on a video project (It’s Fair), and mainly because of our common interest in many fields of Design.
Initial intention was to present a lecture aimed at designers on the themes of counter-advertising techniques and visual education. We are both avid readers of Adbusters, and so we’ve been used to the term Visual Pollution, which relates to the overwhelming amount of advertisements and commercials we are exposed to everyday.
We then decided to make of it the central topic in our lecture, as we believe it is vital to raise awareness on this concept, especially in the arts/creative/visual sector. Gaining some feedback we soon find out that awareness on this issue exists already, as all of us are accustomed to the excess of visual inputs present in contemporary society.
But if we are aware of it, how come it’s still going on?

Our observations lead us to the conclusion that the common person from the street knows about it, but probably doesn’t fully understand the consequences on his behaviour and mental environment, probably because of a lack of visual and critical education. As Epictetus wrote, “Only the educated are free”.
Meanwhile, the designer simply ignores the problem and keeps producing more crap. But there’s no point in being too pessimistic, as slowly things are changing: for example, In São Paulo since 2007 all outdoor advertising is banned.

We soon faded away from the concept of making a slideshow for our project, not because it is a common media, but simply because it couldn’t reach a wider audience. Also, we wanted to use the immense visual waste that is the substance of most advertising commercials nowadays. Everybody has the access to gratuitous amounts of crap, and as we all know, often surfing the web is in the end just about avoiding the stuff we are not interested to.
We have been very interested in culture jamming techniques, in “using the weapons of the enemy to beat it”, sort of speak. Youtube is an enormous database of ads, infomercials and presentations. We wrote our script, and we let the ads speak for themselves.




It's Fair
Young Creative Network Students Awards 2011
Fair Trade Live Brief
Project by Chris Kieling & Pietro Garrone



This stop motion animation is a celebration of food and colour. Our approach was to build a connection to the viewer through colourful collages made out of fair trade products. Having spent a lot of time on the fair trade website, reading texts and watching fair trade documentaries, we noticed that the story of an individual is very important to understand what fair trade is and does. We decided to use playful imagery to visualize and highlight bits of the story we wanted to tell.


It was not our intention to produce something clean and finished. Our main objective was to communicate fun and joy in our animation, and possibly inspire others to be creative. Most people think of bananas and coffee when they think of fair trade. We wanted to mention the familiar products as such, however also focus on the rest of their wide range. That is why we decided to tell the story of the cotton production in Burkina Faso, Africa. Not only is it a story that received too little attention in the past, but it also confronts the viewer with a reality which often gets forgotten about, especially in a time where fashion and textiles have become so important to the masses.




Taxidermy Network Ident
BA Graphic Design First Year
Pick'n'Mix Unit 3 - Moving Image
Groupwork with Melanie Rodriguez, O Thongthai, Katarina Sočan.





Our group created an ident for a television channel that would focus on educating people on the practice of taxidermy, why it’s done, or how to do it themselves. However, with a friendly, and a bit of an ironic, approach to the subject we tried to target an audience of animal lovers who have experienced a true companionship they aren’t necessarily ready to let go of. And to show them taxidermy is not necessarily an old-fashioned and weird practice.



What we wanted was to surprise the audience getting a new light on this subject, exploring the world of taxidermy with a fresher cut. the constant flashbacks confuse the viewer, not able to follow a linear narrative structure, and stimulate him to be curious and to pay interest.