Louise Fili’s Human Touch
As she prepares for her retrospective show, Fili discusses the ways technology has changed the work of a designer.
Louise Fili has a problem that few designers today will have to face. “We forget that twenty years ago, we didn’t make vector logos,” she tells me just before she has to run to her printer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “We’re blowing things up to 10 feet tall, and it turns out that doesn’t work very well at all.”
Fili, a designer known for vintage European-inspired rebrands of food products like Tate’s Cookies and restaurants like Sarabeth’s and Juliana’s Pizza, is in the final stretch of planning her retrospective Masters Series: Louise Fili showing at the Gramercy Gallery from today through December 10. Hosted by New York’s School of Visual Arts, Fili is only the fifth woman to receive SVA’s Masters Series Award in its 28 years.
Fili has been digging through four decades worth of her own work since January, making her way through designs created for Louise Fili Ltd, the studio she founded in 1989, eventually reaching back to the 1970s when she was a 25-year-old designer working under iconic designer Herb Lubalin. Deciding what will be featured in the show was a lesson in how much the work of a designer has changed since she arrived in the field. It’s also reinforced just how far she’ll go to avoid a computer.
“I don’t work on the computer and I don’t think I ever will. I’m just not good with machines in general,” she explains, “I hate to drive and I was afraid of my food processor for years.” Known for her striking twists on classic type, what makes Fili’s work so distinctive is its ability to feel both nostalgic and timeless. Much of Fili’s work revolves around food, and she has spent years refining her ability to create restaurant identities and food packaging that feel comfortable without seeming too familiar. An emphasis on craftsmanship only makes her aesthetic more authentic.
While advances in design software have helped close the gap between Fili’s illustrations and the final product, her creative process has remained the same since she began. She took the same approach to designing posters for SVA’s Subway Poster Series as she did when she designed a pin for Hillary Clinton’s Forty-Five Pin Project: She begins by sketching on tracing paper, refining her concept and landing on a precise final design. Only now, rather than sending that design off to a printer and working with hot metal type, she walks a few feet from her desk and sits next to her designers as they work on the final product in Photoshop. Though it’s rather unusual, and maybe a little nerve wracking, to sit next to your boss as she guides you through her latest design, the process seems to have worked for Jessica Hische and Dana Tanamachi, both prominent designers who got their start working with Fili.
Choosing to stay away from machines wasn’t completely unusual in Fili’s early professional days, because designers weren’t expected to also be technicians. For the first twenty years of her career, printers would scan illustrations and superimpose type themselves, leaving the designer to focus only on the craft. Fili’s analog approach is a testament to designing in a way that works for the designer, regardless of the latest software or industry trend. “For me, the exciting part is the creation and the sketching,” Fili explains, “There’s so much potential in a sketch.”
Alongside designer Kevin O’Callaghan, Fili is using her 2013 exhibition Elegantissima, which ran alongside the release of her monograph of the same name, as the foundation of her Masters Series show. Starting on a cobblestone pathway, the European village-inspired entryway takes visitors through a series of color-coded rooms that each feature one area of Fili’s work.
There’s a library full the books she’s written, as well as the covers designed for publishing houses like Pantheon Books, Princeton Architectural Press, and Thames & Hudson. A kitchen features her favorite food-packaging work, and a restaurant full of identity work includes a full-scale recreation of the wrought iron sign Fili created for Manhattan’s Claudette. A boudoir highlights the rebrand of Hanky Panky, the international lingerie line that Fili helped overhaul.
Each room full of objects and identities is a testament to Fili’s ability to connect her work by a common thread, regardless of the technology that enables it. “Design is very different now,” she explains, “Today, we do it all in vector—and we go to great pains in Photoshop to make it look like it wasn’t done on a computer.”
All images courtesy of Louise Fili.
