Ioana Petcu’s work in the cultural sector explores linguistics as a lens for graphic design

“As a graphic designer working extensively in the cultural field, I see myself as a kind of translator”, Ioana Petcu tells It’s Nice That. When working on artist books, and exhibition identities, the creative is always looking to craft something that is “sensitive to the specific visual language of each artist”, she says. The most important thing the designer goes into a brief with is “a clarity of mind” on the concept she must translate with her visual toolkit, she adds. Whether that’s turning cover type into something as tactile and delicate as a publications content, or crafting a poster that looks like it’s been rolled out of clay for an exhibition of sculptural works, this initial clarity and precision opens up a space for “full experimentation” into an idea that lends itself to unique design outcomes.

Whilst her practice is concept-led, Ioana finds that a lot of the creative inspiration for her work lands on her desk quite coincidentally: in her day to day encounters with typography shape and colour, the “form enthusiast” extensively documents found design and ephemera that she later deconstructs and repurposes. Ioana collated a display of these found shapes and chance run-ins with great typography in her archival publication Findings from the street, which formed one of her Masters Diploma projects at Haute école des Artes du Rhin. This personal tool for building and experimenting with her own visual language was also shaped into an index, displaying her collected forms on transparent sheets that can be overlaid to create new compositions and conversations.

Enamoured by words and the way they look, Ioana often sees language as a starting point for her design process and has found meaning for her practice in theoretical texts like A Thousand Eyes and The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics. “During my studies I began exploring linguistics as a lens for design”, she shares. The designers’ Masters thesis investigated how our existing ideas about linguistics could be applied to visual analysis leading to a series of projects about the relationship between human and AI language. These creative endeavours ranged from “speculative scenarios about digitised courtrooms to web design experiments testing the interplay of syntax and semantics”.