Caterina Santullo is a knitwear and type designer from Turin, Italy. After studying fashion design at Politecnico of Milan, she worked as an art director in fashion consultancy, print designer, and visual researcher in Milan. Aiming to study the visual and conceptual bridges between letters and fashion she moved to Den Haag to study at TypeMedia 2021 Master Course. Caterina’s continuous effort is into exploring middle grounds, in which richness and bliss can happen. Cross-fertilizing with empathy and craving led her to a rich and never-ending learning process. Now she works as a freelance between Italy and The Netherlands, expanding her practice to poetry and photography (while she’s not busy climbing).
This projects aims at an exploration of the boundaries of type design, testing them with an approach of playfulness and deconstruction.
My main goal was to achieve a full living process that could drive me towards surprising new shores.
Behind Siche there is an unfinished, intense, unspoken journey, which started from a common interest in my family: the Standard Model of quantum physics, the scientific explanation of how all existing particles interconnect. Translating the Standard Model into a visual output became the ploy to cross-fertilize and draw with new parameters: the particles' ones.
Exploring the capabilities of my translation in more than 90 dizzying drawings, two main design emerged from the process. On one hand I had organic, tactile, sculptural drawings, on the other rigid and broken shapes, rich in ridiculous details and mechanical flavor. Both were bound by strong textures, questionable legibility, and interconnections between the letters. The question of how to relate these two outputs became the focus of the project.
I started researching abstraction and gesture, playing with the contrast between a microscopic examination of typefaces at really small body sizes and the poetic practice of pulsing gestures in graffiti.
Concluding my research in a family overview of 14 styles, I made a decision in the face of the tight project frame. From the wide range that emerged from looking into the extrems of said contrast, I composed a middleway, which is Siche.
The project itself tells a story of flooding with ease, creating room for interesting mistakes, ravishing creatures, and non-linear narratives.
