Iconic Posters
Italian Celebrities

Twelve Icons, Two Languages

The Società Dante Alighieri, Amman Committee, commissioned a series of iconic posters to celebrate Italian figures from the worlds of science, literature, architecture, theatre, and popular culture. Each poster needed to work bilingually — Italian and Arabic — communicating the identity and legacy of each figure to a Jordanian audience.

The design challenge was to build a system flexible enough to carry very different personalities and disciplines — from Dante to Gae Aulenti, from Dario Fo to Gianni Rodari — while remaining recognisable as a single editorial series commissioned by the same institution.

One Series, Many Visual Languages

Rather than imposing a single rigid template, the series was designed around a shared set of principles: bold typography combining Italian and Arabic scripts, black-and-white archival portraiture integrated into layered collage compositions, and a saturated colour palette that shifts register for each figure — yellow for cultural icons, blue for institutional communication, multicolour for the performing arts.

Each poster tells a complete story in a single image: the subject's name, their discipline in both languages, and a visual environment built from archival material, geometric forms, and collage elements that evoke their world. The bilingual layout was designed with equal visual weight for both scripts — Arabic is never an afterthought.

Dante · Carducci · Rodari · Fo · Aulenti · Pagot

Six figures spanning seven centuries of Italian culture — a poet, a journalist and politician, a children's author, a playwright, an architect, and two animators. Each poster adapts the system to its subject: the Dante poster references manuscript illumination and classical portraiture; the Rodari poster bursts with childhood colour and hand-drawn illustration; the Dario Fo poster captures the energy of theatrical performance.