book - Actar - ISBN 0789724103
An interesting collection of flyers which tell the not-so-official history of the electronic Barcelona (from the beginning of the Nineties to the present). This city has witnessed the birth and evolution of a local scene linked to club culture and new waves, on the border between music and images. It's a relationship which can't be described only with an analysis of their graphic look: the communicative power and the culture which produced those flyers must be analyzed as well. There are several texts included: the one by the curator Tite Barbuzza synthesizes the development of the flyer as a tool, a simple and direct advertising medium, related to the models and icons of the younger generations in the last decades. Others are more specific to the spanish culture, which succeeded in projecting Barcelona and the balearic model on the international stage. Joan Manuel Jubany, particularly, concentrates on how the introduction and diffusion of personal computers have revolutionized the traditional techniques of photocomposition, writing a chronology of the different approaches and the styles of some of the masters (Neville Brody, Swifty, David Carson, The Designers' Republic). It's a very good project but with a flaw: often the digital reproductions are far from perfect.
Aurelio Cianciotta