Susanna Foppoli
Design & Creative DirectorVisual identity for Royal District (designed with Carolina Magro, DVC alumni)
DVC year: 2012
Website: susannafoppoli.com
What was your background before joining DVC? Being from a small town in the North of Italy I wasn’t necessarily formally exposed to what graphic design is and therefore I didn’t consider the possibility of undertaking it as an education and career path. At first I studied philosophy in Italy, with a year of Erasmus in Dublin, followed by a master at UCL in London.In between my bachelor and my master, I had a fortuitous gap year which I spent in Madrid undertaking a sort of foundation course, initially driven by my passion in photography and with no particular agenda. That's where I came across visual communication. The possibility of expressing thoughts and creating meaning through visual outputs really resonated with me – there was a tangibility to it that I was lacking with philosophy. I looked into what graphic design was and it was like all of a sudden what (I didn’t even know) I wanted to do had a name.
Why did you initially chose to do this course? At that point I was already in London doing my master in Philosophy, yet with the awareness that I wanted to shift my focus to graphic design. I took some creative courses that could help me put together an initial portfolio to use for course applications. During a calligraphy class, I was lucky to meet a wonderful type designer, at the time working at Dalton Maag, who had a pivotal role in helping me understand how to move next and who recommended the London College of Communication as the best university for graphic design. Once I stumbled upon the Postgraduate Certificate in Communication was a no-brainer: a unique well-rounded offer, open to people from varied backgrounds, and financially viable. So I applied – one of the best decisions of my life!
Have you got any stories to share? In 2014 an art curator got in touch with me to see if I was interested in exhibiting some of the work from one of the course assignments that caught her attention online. So I turned a few artworks from my editorial piece on Type Classification into prints, which were exhibited at The Book Club in Shoreditch under the exhibit name ‘The formal beauty of type’ as part of the Design Festival. It felt very refreshing to look back to the work and see it under a completely different perspective.
DVC work (type classification): ´An introduction to six typefaces’
How did you implement your experience from the course in your career? During the course I built solid foundations in design principles, theory and history. This gave me a strong sense of direction, which I used as guidance and benchmark to make decisions and define and evolve my approach along my career. What I bring along to this day is the mindset and the attitude that were actively encouraged and supported during the course – the integrity, the curiosity, the versatility, the love of craft and care for details.