Hasta La Ideas

Last year, photographer and Colors co-founder Oliviero Toscani gave a speech at the 92nd Art Director’s Club festival. The text has now been turned into a newspaper and a series of four typographic posters by illustrator Ben Weeks and Underline Studio…

The paper now forms part of the Art Director’s Club‘s communications for its 93rd awards, which will take place in Miami Beach this April.

To make it, Canadian illustrator Weeks took Toscani’s ‘Creativity = Courage’ speech from 2013 and invited Underline Studio to work on a publication which would be sent out to 2,000 ADC members, and made available online to download.

The four posters are shown here, along with an image of the inside text (above) and also of a single page from the PDF version (bottom of post). Spot illustrations of elements from images Toscani has created in his career feature throughout the newspaper.

The ADC was keen to bring the speech’s theme of to life, says Weeks, and initially the illustrator thought it might be easiest to do so within a gallery space. But print won out and Weeks and Underline also created a series of four type-based posters to go with the newspaper, which were also printed by Newspaper Club.

The team also had a link with Toscani himself which no doubt helped the process along. “One of Underline’s principals, Fidel Pena, used to work at Pentagram with Fernando Gutiérrez on Colors,” Weeks explains. “Toscani had to personally approve our work, so Fidel’s deep intuition about the right tone was a huge help.”

The full text of the speech is here; while the 12 page PDF of the newspaper (one page shown below) is also linked on this page, here.

Design and art direction: Underline Studio; Fidel Pena, Claire Dawson, Emily Tu and Jack Choi. Illustration: Ben Weeks. The editions were printed by Newspaper Club. More on the ADC’s 93rd awards festival at adcawards.org/creativity.