EDITORIAL & PRINT
Art Direction · Graphic Design · Editorial Photography · Image Restoration
Milan, Italy · 2022 and 2026
Two books on Italian jewellery. Both written by the same historian.
Bianca Cappello writes about jewellery. She is a historian and critic, a member of the Society of Jewellery Historians in London, and a Perito in Preziosi for the Milan Chamber of Commerce.
I designed her identity in 2019. Since then she has brought me into two museum exhibitions and two books.
These are the books.
Carlo Zini, DREAMS
Carlo Zini made costume jewellery in Milan for fifty years. Crocodiles in emerald paste. A gold mask hung with turquoise and coral. Butterflies the size of a hand. Elizabeth Taylor wore his parures and let people assume they were Richard Burton’s.
The book had to be as unserious as the work and as rigorous as the research.
So the type changes. Drawn Deco letterforms for the Seventies, geometric sans for the Eighties, an engraved italic for the quotations, display ranged right where the page needed to slow down. Not a single family applied consistently across 146 pages, which is what a monograph usually does and what would have made this one solemn.
Italian and English on every page, neither one subordinate. No appendix of translations at the back.
I photographed fifty-two of the pages. The colophon lists them.
Segni Preziosi
Il Disegno del Gioiello Italiano dal XIV al XXI secolo. OADI, Numero Speciale 1/2026. Curated by Lucia Ajello and Bianca Cappello, with a premessa by Maria Concetta Di Natale and essays by sixteen authors.
Seven centuries of Italian jewellery drawing, roughly two hundred images, most of them archival.
I did the graphic design. The images were the other problem.
Some of them were not good enough to print. Photographs of documents. Sixteenth-century sheets with the ink gone pale. Engravings scanned flat, contrast collapsed, detail sitting under a grey veil.
What restoration means here
Improving quality without losing the original.
In a book like this that is not about how the pages look. It is about whether the images can be used. Look at the bottom edge of the Grondoni sheet, before and after. S.D. Froidevaux invenit. I.B. Bertelsman sculpsit. The collection stamp between them. Illegible in the first, readable in the second.
An image too dark to show who engraved it is an image a scholar cannot cite.
So the rule was simple. Recover what is there. Invent nothing. The fold stays. The stains stay. The torn corner stays.
Images reproduced from Segni Preziosi. Il Disegno del Gioiello Italiano dal XIV al XXI secolo, OADI, Numero Speciale 1/2026, curated by Lucia Ajello and Bianca Cappello. ISBN 978-88-905939-8-7. → oadirivista.it
A book is the one format that cannot be updated after it ships.
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