SIGNS 4
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Francesco Dondina
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum SIGNS, contemporary Italian graphic design, is a curated exhibition that each time presents a selection of Italian graphic designers — different in generation, culture, training and language.A conversation between distinct worlds, reflecting on the many souls of the graphic designer’s craft, and treating difference as a cultural value. The authors and studios selected for this 2026 edition are: Atto, Chiara Zhu, Dario Carta, eee studio, Elia Barbieri, esc design, Federica Ricci, FIRM, Giga Design Studio, Giorgia Cadeddu, Giulia Boccarossa, pop-eye studio. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
BOOKSHOCK
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Susanna Vallebona
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum BOOKSHOCK continues the research developed by Oggetto Libro across five editions and seventeen exhibitions in Italy, exploring the dialogue between two complementary worlds: design and art. Here the book is treated as a critical and design device — more than an editorial object, a complex form of expression. The exhibition presents artists’ books that show how the book can transform, taking unexpected forms. Made with heterogeneous materials and techniques, these works sit between object and sculpture. Design books reaffirm the book’s centrality as a tool of communication, design and cultural transmission. A section of hybrid books, made through technique in all its variations, brings artistic and design questions together. Some works revisit tradition with a contemporary poetic charge; others open new experimental paths and answer a younger generation’s desire for innovation. In a world premiere, the exhibition also presents — alongside artefacts and printed copies — a selection of intangible works generated with artificial intelligence, able to surprise and redefine the very ideaof the book. BOOKSHOCK becomes a critical device: a place where the book, in its many forms, lets us examine the conditions of contemporary cultural production and the ways it istransmitted. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
BEST BOOK DESIGN FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Beautiful Italian Books
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum The Best Book Design from All Over the World selection comes to Italy as part of the Biennale Internazionale Grafica at ADI Design Museum. The exhibition maps an international geography of publishing in which the book emerges as the result of a complex chain — a designed, public object. For Italy this is an inaugural moment. From this year the country joins that international network of exchange and recognition for the first time: 2026 sees the birth of Beautiful Italian Books, which gathers and curates aselection of editorial projects that will take part in Best Book Design from All Over the World in Leipzig. The exhibition therefore opens a new space of observation and comparison, reading the book in its final, complete form — where content and form support each other, and where conception, editorial project, design, printing and binding build a single entity through the collaboration of different skills and professions. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
ALFABETI MODERNISTI
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Luca Lattuga
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum Between the late 1920s and the 1940s, visual culture in Italy broke with Liberty decoration and ornament, moving towards a rational simplification of form: pure geometries, clear volumes, elementary harmonies. That modernist season is recorded not only in the well-known graphic works of its leading figures, but also in important — and by no means secondary — experiences at the margins. On the international stage of the time Italy occupied a marginal place in the production of printing types. A closer investigation, however, reveals a far richer picture: a multitude of now-forgotten alphabets, designed and produced by large foundries and smaller firms that absorbed the innovative drive of that cultural moment and spread its languages across the country. Typographic modernity entered Italy’s productive fabric, reaching even the most provincial workshops. “Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani” offers a unique, comprehensive survey of a fragmentary and largely unexplored heritage. The exhibition reassembles wood and metal type produced in Italy between the 1930s and 1940s, opening it to new readings and contemporary interpretation.The display presents a careful selection of this material, much of it unpublished and in some cases surviving in unique specimens. Movable type, specimen sheets, printed matter and period documents bear witness to a vernacular design culture: often local knowledge, developed from below in small workshops, on the border between industry and craft. These types survived the post-war years and remained in use into the 1970s. The exhibition rests on research begun fifteen years ago by Luca Lattuga — type collector, founder of Anonima Impressori and author of Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani, published by Lazy Dog Press in 2025. The book presents, documents and fully reproduces more than 120 alphabets found across Italy, from major centres to the furthest provinces, almost all from his own archive.More than a historical reconstruction, “Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani” looks at a constellation of typographic experiments far from the main circuits of design history, and restores the complexity of the country’s visual culture. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
ID-ICTIONARY
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Silvana Amato
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum Id-ictionary presents a selection of 70 posters by members of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). The exhibition treats the poster as a visual language able to interpret and redefine words on the theme of sharing, and offers a view of contemporary research in international graphic design. Silvana Amato’s curation brings design cultures into dialogue, and underlines the communicative and experimental force of authorial graphic design. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
25x2=ANOTHER JOURNEY
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Matteo Carboni
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum A journey of almost five thousand kilometres across Italy: twenty-six encounters and an irregular map built along the way. A research experience, partly planned and partly left to chance, born from meeting people who live by design — of different generations, paths and sensibilities. Each conversation took place in a setting chosen by the other person: before a view, around an improvised table, walking, eating together. Space is never neutral: it enters the words, changes the time of listening and builds relationships. At the centre of the exhibition is the van that made the journey, gradually becoming home, studio and silent witness. Around it, the project takes shape through materials, images and traces of the conversations gathered on the road. The journey became a book, published in 2025 by Bug Edizioni + Lupetti Editore, that keeps the spontaneity of speech and the beauty of the imperfect, without turning conversation into final answers. It is not a collection of interviews, nor an essay on graphic design: it is an open space of questions, doubts, detours and people. In early 2026 the van set out again, to cross Italy once more and take the book on the road.
MUDDY DANCE, ERIK KESSELS
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by ADCI Art Directors Club Italiano
10:30 – 19:45ADI Design Museum Muddy Dance is an exhibition that celebrates the movement of football. Players seem to perform a choreographed dance on a muddy pitch, tumbling and rolling in search of the ball… or do they? It is a football exhibition for lovers of art and design — and an exhibition for football fans. In Muddy Dance, Erik Kessels proposes a new gesture of reclaiming vernacular photography. He shifts attention from the ball to movement: by erasing the ball from each shot, he turns match action into spontaneous choreography. Kessels brings the beauty of the players’ movement to the foreground and treats this popular sport as an art form. The exhibition remains open until 8 November 2026 during ADI Design Museum opening hours.
AIAP COMMUNITY
22.10
Talk by AIAP
10:30 – 18:30ADI Design Museum AIAP Community is an AIAP event open to members, who present their visual communication projects and strengthen a sense of community — collective growth, exchange, reflection, experiment — in communication design. Selected designers each have 15 minutes, speaking not only about content and motives but about the backstage: ferment and impulse, dialogue with the client, intuitions and unexpected turns.
FESTIVAL NETWORK
22.10
Talk promoted by AIAP with BIG, Desina and Graphic days
10:30ADI Design Museum The Festival Network began as an idea of Graphic Days and AIAP: to connect Italian organisations that promote communication design and visual cultures, and to exchange experience, skills, projects and opportunities. The public presentation of an informal memorandum of understanding brings together, for the first time, festivals and initiatives from different Italian cities, sharing a will to spread design culture and to support young talent and Italian visual culture, at home and abroad. The talk is also a chance to meet those who have joined the network and to share working methods and future prospects: circulating exhibitions and guests, sharing skills and contacts, developing new projects and seeking common funding.
IN ITINERE _ THE PROJECT JOURNEY
22.10
Talk by ISIA Roma
14:30ADI Design Museum Systemic Communication at ISIA Roma Design. The path of a design project is like preparing for a journey: you carefully choose the most suitable tools, share goals with your travelling companions, and remain open, with curiosity, to what you do not yet know.Like every journey, the project takes shape in the waiting, unfolds in the experience, and lives on in the memory. In ISIA Roma courses, students develop projects that imagine still-unexplored worlds, giving rise to experimental narratives and artefacts of an innovative, visionary character. Research extends from the tangible dimension of reality to the more intimate dimension of consciousness, in a process where form and content build each other. ISIA Roma, founded in 1973, is the first public university institute of design in Italy, awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1979 for its educational model.
BARILLA “BEHIND THE SCENES”
22.10
Details coming soon
15:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
THE VALUE OF COLOUR IN GRAPHIC DESIGN
22.10
Talk by Fedrigoni with Dario Carta
16:30ADI Design Museum Colour is not a merely aesthetic choice: it is a design tool. This talk explores how colour shapes perception, communication and the effectiveness of a message, with a specific focus on paper.
TOUCH TO BELIEVE
22.10
Talk by Packaging Première
17:30ADI Design Museum Designing sensory accessibility in premium packaging Premium packaging speaks in codes: glossy surfaces, tone-on-tone colour, slender type, minimal text. These choices build perceived value, but they can become barriers. Legibility is not only a matter of type size: it is typeface, colour, finish, contrast, material. This meeting follows the packaging design process from the first physical element to the last informative detail: matter and surfaces (glossy or matt films, transparencies, metallisation, flow packs, deformability); colour and contrast as tools of recognition; finishing as a potentially functional, tactile language; typography and label design in wine and spirits. The aim is not to oppose accessibility and desirability, but to show that they can coincide. A readable, tactile, inclusive desirability is today a new form of quality — and of responsibility — for brands.
ERIK KESSELS
22.10
Talk with Erik Kessels
18:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon. This event will be held in English.
THE BRAND AS A LEVER FOR CORPORATE IDENTITY
23.10
Seminar with Gaetano Grizzanti, curated by AIAP
09:00–16:30ADI Design Museum Open to the public and addressed to graphic designers and visual communication professionals, the course is dedicated to corporate branding and identity systems for industry and service companies. A practical and critical session on the designer’s role in an organisation’s strategic and identity processes: from the relationship with the client to building a coherent, effective corporate identity. Places are limited. To be given priority, book at aiap@aiap.itFee: €49, or €9 for AIAP membersA certificate of attendance will be issued. Full details
URBAN ARCHIGRAPHY
23.10
Talk by Migliore+Servetto
10:30ADI Design Museum Signs, senses and shared identity. Urban archigraphy — the set of signs of function, identity and belonging — is a visual system to be inhabited. It points to destinations and tells the traveller what they will find along the way, and why. A cornerstone of urban identity, it defines an inclusive, dynamic language that can both guide and generate a sense of community. The talk opens a reflection on environmental graphic design in shaping a neighbourhood’s identity — a kind of urban tattoo in the making. What is a neighbourhood? An invisible border, or a weave of stories? Where does it begin, where does it dissolve, and how far does it belong to us?Like a human being, urban archigraphy brings together the Kantian crossing of intellect and reason — the first generating knowledge, the second meaning — joined by passion, the lever that nourishes belonging.
WRITING, EDITING FOR RESEARCH
23.10
Talk by Valeria Bucchetti / Politecnico di Milano
11:30ADI Design Museum A communication design series. For more than fifteen years the series published by FrancoAngeli has reflected on research in communication design, focusing on the themes and perspectives of the discipline’s evolution. Is there a future for research publishing? Giovanni Baule, Letizia Bollini, Clorinda Galasso, Francesco Guida and Salvatore Zingale discuss how research circulates — and how it might develop.
TYPE DESIGN TALK
23.10
Talk by Peter & Schmidt Group
14:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon. This event will be held in English.
ART DIRECTORS CLUB ITALIANO
23.10
Talk by ADCI Art Directors Club Italiano
15:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
ALLIANCE GRAPHIQUE INTERNATIONALE
23.10
Talk by AGI Alliance Graphique Internationale
16:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
OWN YOUR AURA!
23.10
Talk by Peter&Schmidt Group
17:30ADI Design Museum The myth factor in brand building — and the destructive power of an obsession with performance. Today brand building is expected to be measurable, optimised by algorithms and AI agents, and therefore as efficient as possible. Yet a brand’s most valuable asset cannot be decoded from data: it is the fascination it exerts on people, and the cultural context in which that fascination takes shape. Since its founding in 1972, Peter Schmidt Group has cultivated the aura of brands — a path that began with Jil Sander, a house whose strength and luminosity remain unchanged. The same philosophy guides the agency’s current work for clients such as Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telekom and Weleda: design that can create myth and aura makes brands distinctive, relevant and, ultimately, more valuable than competitors driven only by the pursuit of performance. This event will be held in English.
THE DESIGNER AS ACTIVIST
23.10
Talk with Patrick Thomas
18:30ADI Design Museum Drawing on projects from his own practice, Patrick Thomas will speak about what happens when designers step beyond the conventional role of service providers and begin to treat their work as a form of political and social engagement. This event will be held in English.
BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE DALTON MAAG RETAIL CATALOGUE
24.10
Talk with Riccardo De Franceschi / Dalton Maag
10:30ADI Design Museum Universality or individuality? Function or expression? Convention or innovation? Navigating the digital type market means holding opposing forces in balance — an exercise Dalton Maag’s retail catalogue has pursued for thirty-five years. Riccardo takes us behind the scenes to tell the work of a team of designers and developers spread across three continents, retracing challenges and successes through some of the collection’s most significant typefaces, from the viewpoint of those who designed them.
NOT ENOUGH BY DESIGN
24.10
Talk by Zetafonts with Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Debora Manetti
11:30ADI Design Museum What drives a designer never to settle? “Not Enough by Design” explores the creative tension that pushes a project beyond form, towards sense, intention and meaning. Design and typography become tools for shaping ideas, communicating with greater awareness and leaving a positive trace for the future. A path through ambition, responsibility and doubt, in which impostor syndrome is not necessarily a limit: it can become a drive to experiment, to keep questioning oneself, and to look for new possibilities.
DESIGNING TYPE REVIVALS: ALFABETI MODERNISTI
24.10
Talk by CAST Foundry
12:30ADI Design Museum Alfabeti Modernisti is a CAST project dedicated to rediscovering and digitising 25 Italian typefaces designed between 1920 and 1940, originally cut in wood and lead and collected by Luca Lattuga. The revival was not a mere transfer of the originals: each typeface was interpreted and adapted to the digital medium, addressing imperfections and inconsistencies and expanding the glyph sets for contemporary use. The talkretraces this process, from selecting and digitising the typefaces through to their communication and circulation.
ALFABETI MODERNISTI
24.10
Talk with Carlo Vinti, Luca Lattuga
14:30ADI Design Museum What does it mean, today, to take on the ancient craft of movable-type printing? The first obstacle is to build a workshop. Unless you inherit the trade, recovering tools, materials and type from a technique that has almost disappeared demands skills far beyond the graphic arts: becoming designer, compositor, researcher, dealer in discarded materials, mover — and sometimes even mechanic.In fifteen years of research and adventure, chasing material from old print shops closing in every corner of Italy, I have built a substantial archive. The extraordinary variety of alphabets found — many without name, author or documentation — opened a question: how much do we really know about twentieth-century Italian type culture? Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani, a research project on movable type produced in the 1930s and 1940s, is my answer to an intuition born in the field. The research reconstructs the historical, aesthetic and manufacturing context, surveying original Italian alphabets, relating them to the international scene and, at the same time, deepening their territorial specificities.What emerges is a heritage far more complex, rich and varied than we have known until now.
SENSE & SENSIBILITY
24.10
Workshop curated by Zetafonts, with Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini
15:00–17:00ADI Design Museum “Sense & Sensibility” is a workshop that takes participants on a journey between the geometric rigour of form and the warm naturalness of handwriting, showing how even apparently simple letters can reveal surprising emotional nuance. The art of drawing letters has always moved between a rational, geometric dimension and a more expressive one, tied to calligraphic gesture.Looking at sans-serif classics — from Paul Renner’s Futura to Eric Gill’s Gill Sans — the workshop teaches how to distinguish geometric from humanist sans. A subtle but essential distinction, if type is to be used with intention: affecting not only the look of a text, but its emotional perception. Registration details will be announced soon.
BEAUTIFUL ITALIAN BOOKS
24.10
Talk by Federica Ricci, Emilio Macchia
15:30ADI Design Museum The talk presents Beautiful Italian Books as a cultural project still under construction — from its beginnings and its development inside a community that supports its structure and orients its prospects. It moves through the project’s constitutive elements — the jury, the exhibition, the catalogue — placing Beautiful Italian Books in dialogue with historic partner awards: devices through which to read different approaches to selecting, judging and presenting contemporary publishing, and the design and material conditions behind it. The talk then turns to the international circuit Best Book Design from All Over the World, which brings together 34 countries already active in national book-design awards, and which Italy now joins. In the Italian context, where the specifics of cultural policy bear directly on the quality of publishing, international comparison becomes a necessary space of reading and verification: crossing practices, skills, production systems and economic models, and reading the book as the outcome of complex material and design conditions.
DIA STUDIO
24.10
Details coming soon
16:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
LIBRO
24.10
Talk with Leonardo Sonnoli
17:30ADI Design Museum “Everything important I have ever done could fit in a small book” (M.D.) The book is one of those ancient inventions that lasts without changing form.A series of sheets, fastened on one side. They can vary in a few significant details that condition the ideas they hold; and the ideas they hold influence the choice of those details. A presentation of some extraordinary books that contain art — and of a few of my own attempts to put art inside a book.
BOOK ON BOOKS
24.10
Talk with Irma Boom
18:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon. This event will be held in English.
MONOGRAMS
25.10
Talk with James Clough, Fabrizio Falcone
11:30ADI Design Museum Monograms are extreme simplifications of alphabetic communication, and this book shows how they can be more powerful, expressive and meaningful than logos. With hundreds of illustrations, accompanied by the author’s comments, anecdotes and stories, Monogrammi is the first narrative history of the subject. Part 1 traces the evolution of styles, from the coins of ancient Greece through the centuries to twentieth-century modernism — the last movement with a generally recognisable style. Part 2 focuses on the many design approaches taken after the Second World War, during the rise of consumerism and the need for competitive ideas. Selected monograms by well-known and lesser-known designers — and even by some students — are analysed and discussed.
GRAFICA MAGAZINE
25.10
Talk by Grafica Magazine
12:30ADI Design Museum Page being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
TOWARDS A MUSEUM OF GRAPHIC DESIGN
25.10
Round table promoted by BIG and AIAP CDPG (AIAP Graphic Design Documentation Centre)
10:30ADI Design Museum On the closing day of BIG – Biennale Internazionale Grafica 2026, the organisers, together with AIAP, the Italian association for visual communication design, host a round table on the possible future founding of a museum of graphic design. Milan, internationally recognised as one of the capitals of design, has several institutions that promote design culture, but none specifically dedicated to graphic design. Since 2009 AIAP has run a Graphic Design Documentation Centre (AIAP CDPG), which now holds one of the most significant documentary collections in the field: some 125 fonds in the names of well-known and lesser-known figures of Italian and international graphic design. A unique heritage — a historical archive and a rich specialist library — that allows the Association to curate exhibitions in Italy and abroad, to promote research, to open the holdings to scholars and students, and to keep precious documents and testimonies from being scattered.From the outset AIAP CDPG has seen itself not only as an archive, a place of conservation, but as an agent of dissemination and knowledge. To strengthen the case for a future museum dedicated to graphic design and communication design, the round table brings together testimonies and experiences from organisations of many kinds, from all over Italy.The aim is to foster mutual knowledge, collaboration — and, in time, a foundation.
THE CHARMING MAG
25.10
Talk by NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti
17:30ADI Design Museum Independent publishing as an educational project. NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti presents This Charming Mag, a meeting on independent publishing as a tool of research, experiment and education inside the Academy.Through magazines made in recent years by students of the two-year specialised programme in Visual Design and Integrated Marketing Communication, the event traces the evolution of the editorial project in magazine form, following the creative process of an independent publication: from concept to art direction, from content to graphic design.A workshop in contemporary narrative design that tests the magazine format — stressing and questioning it as a container and expression of content, languages and forms — in order to give space and life to independent cultural projects that mirror the research and design vision of a new generation. Speakers include Roberto Maria Clemente, art director and NABA lecturer, and Fabio Pelagalli, Course Leader of NABA’s specialised two-year programmes in Visual Design and Marketing Communication and in User Experience Design.
FROM THE EYE TO THE HEART
25.10
Talk with Armando Milani
Talk with Armando Milani18:30 ADI Design MuseumPage being updated. Further details about this event will be announced soon.
