The training you don’t expect: bookbinding in Tipoteca Italiana

Background: two or three things you (perhaps) didn’t know about Palazzina training

We are not going to bore you with how fundamental we consider training to be for professional and personal growth. We also didn’t want to tell you again that Palazzina Creativa is B Corp: we only do it because it means that, like it or not, training is to be done here (always willingly anyway, N.B.).
Suffice it to say that in 2022 we invested 9% of the budget and 324 hours in training, with customised plans based on the skills to be developed and personal inclinations.
This is to say that the experience in Tipoteca Italiana – a cultural association that celebrates the art of typography and the history of printing with a museum and educational programmes – however unexpected, is part of a plan of activities of Palazzina Creativa’s training path.

Enhancing skills, training creativity

Certifications, profession-specific training courses: checked. Paths to improve soft skills that need a boost: pure.
Sometimes, however, we forget to enhance and train the most important skill of all, creativity: no matter whether you are a graphic designer, content manager, or adv specialist. Or (stereotype alert: ON) accountant. We are talking about that creativity understood in the manner of Stefan Muwam – writer and art director of the digital agency First Person in San Francisco, a man who knows a thing or two about creativity – that is the capacity for ‘problem solving’, with something more: relevance and innovation, that is, the degree to which a problem is actually solved (relevance) and the degree of uniqueness and originality that solution possesses (innovation).

Creative building in Italian typography

Tipoteca Italiana is a cultural association based in Cornuda (TV) founded in 1995 by Silvio Antiga, a typographer and graphic designer, dedicated to preserving and promoting the art and craft of typography and letterpress printing.
It was here that our designers approached the basics of bookbinding, with a workshop in which they explored three binding techniques – obviously after visiting the museum, which houses a collection of over 20,000 pieces of typefaces, matrices, machine punches and other printing equipment.

Feedback?
No, no one has expressed a willingness to throw the monitor to the nettles and devote themselves to paper, scissors, glue, string and everything else. Happy to have understood, experienced first-hand how the world of bookbinding works? Yes. To have delved into the roots of graphic design with a visit to the museum? Yes.
Stepping out of the box and saying goodbye for half a day to mice, keyboards and graphic pens to try our hand at the ancient art of bookbinding was a way to broaden one’s horizons and stimulate creativity: not the only one we came up with, but we won’t tell you any more for now!