La Tigre

posted by Emily Gosling December 17, 2020

Milan-based studio La Tigre has been running for some years now—it set up shop back in 2009—and recently got in touch to show off a raft of gorgeous new print pieces.

Founded and directed by Luisa Milani and Walter Molteni, the studio describes its focus as “research-based,” closely collaborating with its clients across a range of different projects “in order to convey their ideas, vision and inspirations” into visual language systems. “We believe in beauty and timeless ideas,” says the studio.

The print shop showcases La Tigre’s signature punchiness: simplicity is at the fore, with pieces usually based around limited shapes and beguiling uses of pattern and colour. Among the new prints, however, are a beautiful monochrome number that takes a tongue-in-cheek look at Milan’s architecture, spanning the century from 1930 to 2030. Buildings are reduced to their simplest components: brickwork, colonnades, arches and Memphis-like patterns. The print titled Incognito, meanwhile, is a glorious slice of Op-Art retina-trickery, laid out in stark black and white with a comforting gradient at its centre.

Elsewhere, the familiar blocky lettering spelling out LOVE (as made famous by American pop artist Robert Indiana, and anyone who’s ever been near it with an Instagram account) is finally given its partner in crime: yup, La Tigre gave HATE the same typographic treatment.

The core of La Tigre’s work, however, lies in its client work. Covering brand strategy, logo creation, art direction, book and catalogue design, web design, packaging, set design and more; La Tigre’s clients include Wired, The Guardian, IL Magazine, Il Sole 24 Ore, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Variety and agencies such as Ogilvy&Mather, Pentagram and Winkreative. Since mid-2019, the studio also become the art director of the Italian design magazine Living – Corriere della Sera.

We’re yet to find any explicit links between this La Tigre and Kathleen Hanna’s superb trio that (almost) shares its name; but since you’ve almost certainly got Deceptacon stuck in your head now (if you don’t, are you even human?), here’s a link to that blistering indie disco staple with a video that we really dig created by motion design grad Timo Wilke. Nice work Timo.