The new Lahofer Winery headquarters was built especially to fit into the vitricultural landscape of the Znojmo region. The company offices are located here as well as the production plant and the visitor area. The design concept is based on the idea of repeating the orderly character of vine rows inside the building in the form of the structural system. The architects also invited artist Patrik Hábl to collaborate on this project, and his artwork can be seen on the concrete vaults. The public part of the building program is enhanced by the undulating roof fitted with outdoor seating, which forms a sort of amphitheatre and serves for staging various events. Offices of the company management and employees are next to the visitor center. The entrance to the production area, divided into two separate volumes, leads from the intersection of the visitor center and offices.

What’s hiding underneath the glitter of 21st century cities and their saturated urban environments? Behind their whitewashed walls? Let’s get a pneumatic drill and find out. Granted, this makes for a somewhat “punk” artistic technique, in what has sometimes been dubbed contemporary urban archeology. But it reveals the history absorbed by city walls around the world. By chiseling away the layers of plaster it creates portraits of everyday heroes, people that shape and are shaped by the cities they live in. Scattered around the world the artworks speak of beauty and destruction, of effacement but also of resistance, exploring not only the connections and contrasts, but also the similarities and differences between global and local realities.

It all started with a successful diploma thesis focusing on Graphic Design in Public Space, which included a map of visual pollution (see ERA21 #03/2018). Five years later, Veronika Rút Fullerová sticks to the same topic. She educates, publishes manuals, and provides consultation in visual communication to cities and firms. In the interview with ERA21 she explains how visual identity can affect companies’ success, how aesthetic quality of our environment affects our mental health, and what we can do to improve the current state of public spaces.

Visual pollution – especially the type caused by shop promotional signs on streets and squares – is typically a local problem. And as such, city halls and town halls should be able to deal with it. But are they provided with proper legislation? What does the war against visual pollution really look like? The following article documents a recent push to tame the advertising jungle, currently present in the Czech capital’s historical center.

Until recently, the courtyard of the Goose on a String Theatre in Brno was used just for car parking and technical purposes, occasionally hosting minor events. Now it has been transformed into a café and a stage for performances, concerts, or author readings. The design was inspired by the principles of Elizabethan stage. A new visual campaign coincided with the architectural transformation and included a redesign of the theater logo, present inside the courtyard in the form of a light object. Provázek is an example of an enterprise that doesn’t need external signage, in principle, and its visual presentation is based on the combination of architecture and graphic design, compelling interiors, and good business strategy.

Advertising has always been an inherent part of business. Guild signs or shop signs marking various workshops, stores and inns can be considered as early forms of outdoor advertisement. The industrial revolution accelerated urban development, which led to abandoning the practice of concentrating the same crafts and shops into streets or squares (Blacksmith Str., Tanner Str., Grain Market, Fish Market etc.). Mixing crafts and shops together meant it was necessary, for better orientation of customers, to highlight the types of businesses. Owners also sought to increase promotion outside the premises with posts, signs and banners. New, commercial forms of outdoor advertisement were born this way. Today we know them as billboards or bill postings.

In the evolution of the graphic style in shop signs in Czechoslovak towns there are several stages to be traced, subdividing the forty years’ period, starting with February 1948 and ending with the November revolutions in 1989. Political pressure, technological advancement, and certain fashion trends that got smuggled past the iron curtain, all played a part in the development.

A sign writer’s task is to find solutions fitting individual clients, places, and their character. There are almost an infinite number of ways to achieve that. We shall introduce a few in the following article.

Following the previous successful collaborations between the OKOLO creative collective and Hermès Czech Republic, the premises of the French luxury brand in Pařížská street featured a temporary window displays from September till December 2018. Inspired by the Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari and his drawings, perforated metal sculptures shaped as human faces were installed to display merchandise instead of shelves. The installation consisted of four windows, each with a different arrangement and color scheme.

Activists in Lille recently demonstrated against advertising, while Grenoble has replaced hundreds of adverts with trees and noticeboards. Could cities remove ads altogether?

These days, experienced developers prepare manuals, explaining their shopping malls’ visual identity, even before they begin construction. They implement the manuals in lease contracts, preventing the brand new building from being ruined by rogue advertising. In cases like these, a clear vision and a concentrated effort to think about the project comprehensively, always come first. When is the right time to invite a graphic designer to collaborate on a project? What can a graphic designer bring to the table? Isn’t an architectural visualization, a logo, and a few pictograms enough? Or is the issue much broader?

As one of the best known and most visible domestic companies, the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery realized it bears responsibility for the visual appearance of its partner pubs and restaurants, and decided to adopt a brand new approach to its public presentation. The brewery now endeavors to significantly reduce visual pollution and simplify and clarify its presentation both inside and outside the establishments. The brewery collaborated with Veronika Rút Fullerová, designer and public space advertising expert, to introduce the Fresh Outlet initiative based on a customer survey. People prefer a more modest presentation of establishments, the survey shows, because it’s more pleasing and better for orientation. Prazdroj also consulted with city halls on the initiative.

Brno’s Futurum Shopping Center could be seen as a typical example of 1990s shopping areas. The grey, shapeless box of a building sprawls over 35,000 m2 of land. The city center is too far, but a highway to Vienna just a stone’s throw away, so the drivers can enjoy the high walls covered with brand logos. But the shopping mall’s dreary appearance will soon go through a radical change. The interior is to be completely refurbished, the entrances redesigned, and the area in front of the main entrance revitalised and planted with trees and tall grasses. Controlling and organizing the rampant outdoor advertisement, together with a brand new color scheme for the facade, are key elements in the renovation.

The urban signage we see every day on the streets – panels, displays, road signs or screens – has a specific functional aesthetic. The common characteristics here are industrial build quality, ultra-low resolution, high contrast, and sometimes a romantic sort of mechanical clatter accompanying the change of information. By extracting them from their original functional context and re-programming them, the authors search for infinite visual permutation through ever changing abstract graphic patterns. New images and animations are generated while the layout and organisation of the original hardware or medium stays intact.