EP. 08 – Superness

Digital type foundry, shared space and editorial design studio: Superness is a collaborative design practice run by Alessio D’Ellena.

Started in 2016 as a side project alongside his work as a designer, and later turned into a research partnership with Federico Antonini for a few years, Superness today essentially embodies D’Ellena’s design philosophy, in contrast to contemporary mainstream design trends.

What Superness aims to do, in fact, is to completely reject an idealised image of design – seen by many as a formal and flawless expression of its function – in other words, the gute form theorised by Max Bill in 1957.

Superness rejects the Gute Form, using rip-off teqniques and plagiarism as working modalities and embraces awkwardness as formal solution.
Seeking for atypical and improper uses of tools.

Superness’s ethos lies in embracing doubt and error rather than clarity and perfection, rejecting a linear process and instead celebrating deviations, mistakes and shortcuts in a mocking way.

Looking at the typefaces published to date, this philosophy aligns with D’Ellena’s raw and unique aesthetic; as a type designer, he proved his ability over the years to perfectly capture the spirit of the times — outside the confines of Superness, a prime example is ABC Laica, the typeface published with Dinamo, begun during his time at KABK.

Each of Superness’s three typefaces therefore owes its aesthetic to a specific design requirement or to a simple, instinctive idea, without adhering too closely to established conventions. Hantarex Mono, which came first chronologically, was created as the identity typeface for Careof — a video archive and research space based in Milan — and echoes the post-industrial electronics aesthetic associated with the eponymous Italian company.

The same applies to semiT, whose name is actually than a semordnilap of Times, consisting — in a fully plagiaristic and radical philosophy — of an Italic version of Times New Roman whose angle of inclination has been reduced to zero. A virtually instant design exercise, which at the same time yields a practically usable result with a measure of critical depth.

However, the typeface chosen as the focus of this episode is the only one missing from the list above: Modulo, the typeface with the most extensive family released by Superness so far and probably the most widely used, despite its ‘short’ lifespan.

Unlike Hantarex Mono and semiT, Modulo originated as a more classic revival of an existing typeface: the eponymous Modulo produced by Nebiolo in the 1970s, winner of the Compasso D’Oro award in 1979. Designed by a team of Milanese graphic design masters — including Giancarlo Iliprandi, Bruno Munari and Franco Grignani — with the support of designers from the Turin-based Nebiolo type foundry, Modulo is based on a purely graphic (rather than optical) construction of its forms, effectively using geometric modules that consequently influence the appearance of its letters.

To design this revival, Alessio D’Ellena started from the original Modulo sketches provided by Associazione Giancarlo Iliprandi, preserving all the idiosyncrasies of Munari’s early sketches — in some cases even accentuating them, as in the design of the ‘4’ — and updating certain shapes to make them more legible in the Bold and Extra weights, as well as the newly added Ultra weight.

Modulo, like its original version, remains a typeface with an extremely unique look, precisely thanks to all the optical imbalances that make it interesting, such as the narrow aperture of the ‘G’, the reduced counterform of the ‘A’ and the punctuation that consistently follows the geometry of the modules.

Far from the dogmas and canonical requirements of type design, full of weirdness but with an undoubtedly spot-on aesthetic: Modulo is the perfect summary of what Superness aims to be. And it is precisely what we need today.