Artiva Design's bold black and white catalogue for contemporary art show

I don’t know what the Italian for “Jack of all trades” is – maybe “Giacomo of all trades” if that’s not clumsily xenophobic – but Genoa based studio Artiva Design seem to fit the bill. The “About” section of their website lists more than 30 areas in which they offer their services, from user interface to book design, copywriting to video editing.

But that’s not to suggest for one second that Daniele De Batté and Davide Sossi are spreading themselves too thinly; in fact a quick romp through the pair’s portfolio throws up all manner of interesting work. We’ve chosen to focus on this catalogue for the exhibition at Genoa’s Museum of Contemporary Art in the Villa Croce, which celebrated ten years of architecture, media and art laboratory Plug_in.

The big, bold typographic treatment which runs around the cover and title pages apes the connected nature of Plug_in’s activities and can only be fully appreciated with a little bit of lateral thinking. Its continuation through the numbers that order the content ties together what appears to be pretty disparate material (although as we’ve established my Italian is somewhat limited).

A couple of years ago we were bowled over by Artiva’s exhibition design skills; it appears the duo have lost none of their sparkle.