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an Thessaloniki be considered a design hub? Its design community is certainly an exciting and active network. Whether veterans or novices, all of the city’s designers that I spoke with described their community as being a big family – everyone knows each other and most work together. The city has been a haven for young designers since the mid-1990s; they were attracted because day-to-day life is much easier here than in Athens and because they can stand out in the city’s smaller market. (At the same time, of
say that they weren’t imitating, they were adopting international trends and movements. One characteristic example was that produced by Stergios Delialis, the guru of the new generation of designers, who in 1969 created the much-admired album cover for “To Perivoli tou Trelou” (The Madman’s Garden) from the singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos; the cover is strongly reminiscent of UK record cover art of the period. (In the 1990s, Delialis founded and ran the now-defunct Design Museum of Thessaloniki.) By the ‘70s and ‘80s, however, Thessaloniki’s graphic design output had be-
STERGIOS DELIALIS
STERGIOS DELIALIS
RED CREATIVE
DOLPHINS STUDIO FOR PARALLAXI MAGAZINE
course, with modern communications technology, they are also able to seize opportunities from far beyond the limits of the city or even the country.) From the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Thessaloniki design scene consisted of people rather than firms, starting with Ioannis Svoronos (1919-1987) the father of Greek design who, from 1954 to 1964, created all of the visual material for the Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF). There was also the visual artist, translator, poet and prose writer Karolos Tsizek (19122013) who from 1958 to 1983 designed the influential literary review Diagonios, published by the renowned Thessaloniki poet Dinos Christianopoulos. In the 1960s, the city’s design scene began to take off. Local designers liked to
come almost exclusively limited to work done for the TIF, the National Theater of Northern Greece, the State Museum of Contemporary Art and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. There was also a little bit – albeit more visible because of the broader audience base – of design being done in relation to literature, including work on the cultural supplement Panselinos that accompanied the Sunday edition of the newspaper Makedonia. This art magazine, which in 2000 won a European Newspaper Design Award and in 2001 a Greek Graphic Design and Illustration Award, was created by graphic designer Thanasis Georgiou and writer Giorgos Skabardonis. (Georgiou still designs covers for the Thessaloniki publisher Ianos and has had work fea-
Dimitris Papazoglou
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