Eat, Travel, Design: The World of Louise Fili

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of HOW Magazine. Get the issue here, or subscribe to experience the reimagined HOW.

by Ellen Shapiro

Everything old is new again. It's a saying, it's song lyrics. In the hands of Louise Fili, it's real. Fili takes the best of what's old—the most intriguing, the most elegant of vintage typography, signage, and design—and makes it new again. For four decades, she has stayed relevant and in demand by applying what she discovers on her European travels to identities that distinguish many of today's best restaurants and food and luxury products.

Two thousand book jackets. Two hundred restaurant identities. Too many food and beverage and luxury goods packages to count. She's a New Yorker, but her work pays tribute to Rome and Florence, Paris and Barcelona, to the culture and art of places she knows intimately. Fili's world is filled with passion for the delicious, rare and decorative aspects of life, beginning with her earliest memories—many of them of food.

EAT

For Fili, the appreciation for good food came young. "My parents were always cooking," she says, describing the organic garden her Italian-born parents, Ferdinand from Sicily and Filomena from Calabria (rechristened Fred and Phyllis in America), tended in their suburban New Jersey backyard. "It was huge, with every kind of vegetable," she recalls. "When everybody else was dining on iceberg lettuce, my two sisters and I grew up on arugula, escarole, radicchio, Swiss chard, and what seemed like a hundred different hybrids of tomatoes. We thought everyone's parents woke up talking about what to make for dinner."

She was, and is, always cooking, too. Her first New York City apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up in a tenement, but it was chosen for its big kitchen and location in what she calls "the gastronomic neighborhood" of the West Village near Zito's bakery, Faicco's pork store, and Raffetto's pasta. There, while honing her design and typography skills under Herb Lubalin by day, she perfected her Bolognese sauce and tiramisu after hours via Marcella Hazan and Guiliano Bugialli's cookbooks and classes.

Now, when not traveling or dining in one of her clients' restaurants, she walks through Union Square Greenmarket almost every day to pick up something fresh for dinner. At home, over, say, grilled fish and broccoli rabe, she and her husband of more than 30 years, author and design educator Steven Heller, eat, plan, talk… perhaps about their next European trip or co-authored book.

See more of Louise's beautiful work over at PrintMag.com.

LEARN

Learning also began early for Fili. She didn't just know her letters (and how to read) by age 5. She was making her own alphabet books on the lined paper her parents brought home from the elementary-school classrooms where they taught. "Letterforms always fascinated me," she says. At Brentano's bookstore in the local mall she found her first Dover books on illuminated initials and decorative alphabets. "I learned typography by redrawing every letter," she says. "I just loved making the letters." Not content with copying complex letterforms designed by others, she sent away for Speedball lettering books and an Osmiroid pen and taught herself calligraphy. In high school, she was the one who designed and silkscreened the posters for the school plays and dances.

"They called it 'commercial art' then," she says, explaining how she made her art commercial by selling fellow students her coveted illuminated manuscripts of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel lyrics.

Always wanting to be around books, her after-school jobs were at the school and town libraries. Becoming a research librarian in art history was an early, if abandoned, career aspiration. Fili enrolled in the fine art program at Skidmore College, a liberal arts college in upstate New York known for its creative approaches to the humanities and arts. Professor Victor Liguori, who taught one of the few design classes, mentored her and allowed her to take fewer credits in painting and do more independent study projects like designing an all-typographic Italian cookbook. But after seeing the School of Visual Arts catalog—"Oh my god, look at all the classes in typography!"—Fili left Skidmore and did her last semester at SVA. The teachers there included type designer Ed Benguiat, who gave every student a Photo-Lettering catalog that is still among Fili's prized possessions and sources of inspiration.

"Combine design with something you're passionate about," she advises students now. "Find your own voice. It's the only way to grow as a designer." Through her example, they learn that design is not about imitating a style, but comes about through deep research, knowledge of craft, perseverance, and that illusive thing called talent.

Learn about typography, web design and other topics at HOW Design University.

WORK

Fili's first lucky break was landing an internship at New York's Museum of Modern Art under Curator of Design Emilio Ambasz, the Argentine-born architect and planner. He was curating "The Italian Idea," a show that introduced New Yorkers, including Fili, to Italian furniture and industrial design. Her next assignment was in MoMA's photography department, where she helped with printing, matting, framing, and hanging—and learned how museum exhibitions come together.

All unpaid internships must end, and at a time when women were asked, "Can you type?" and "Can you take dictation?" Fili got a design job at a small studio where projects included promotions for Glamour magazine and other Condé Nast titles. From there it was onward and upward to the office of B. Martin Pedersen, the publisher of Graphis, then-art director of in-flight magazines and corporate collateral.

After several months of flush-left Times Roman, Fili returned to her first love, books, through a freelance project. She spent nine months with author Midge Mackenzie, producing the illustrated companion to Shoulder to Shoulder, a PBS documentary about the British women's campaign for voting rights. "Giving birth to that volume taught me a lot of life lessons," she says, "about feminism, about the suffragette movement, and about how to design a book." Shoulder to Shoulder was selected for the AIGA "50 Books" exhibition, and Fili's career was launched.

She was freelancing at Random House when a designer who admired her typographic style suggested that she meet Herb Lubalin. Not entirely convinced that she was "ready," she nevertheless dropped off her portfolio at Lubalin, Smith, Carnase (LSC), where Lubalin hinted that a new position might be open in a few months. "I had to find a way to keep in touch with him," she says. So she cleverly asked if he might be interested in an article for U&lc on rubber stamps— one of her collecting passions. U&lc (Upper and Lower Case, the International Journal of Typo-Graphics) was Lubalin's inventive and influential creation, the tabloid that marketed LSC-designed ITC typefaces via illustrated articles about type-centric topics like quirky alphabets and vintage billboards. "He was," Fili says, "so I brought over my collection and thus had an excuse to check in every few weeks. When I returned to pick up the rubber stamps, I made my best attempt to start a conversation with famously-taciturn Herb. Had the new position opened up? It had; someone had given notice that day."

With that, Fili got her second lucky break.

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Source: Eat, Travel, Design: The World of Louise Fili