Silvio Antiga – Tipoteca Italiana

As “birthday gift” for the first 25 years (1995–2020), Tipoteca Italiana asked 25 designers and printers, from all over the world, to design and print a poster. The project 25×25. Tipoteca 25 was conceived in this way. Maximum freedom of creation was left, except for a few rules: the size (50 × 70 cm), the colors (maximum 4 colors), and the printing technique (letterpress). Over half of the posters were made directly in the printshops of the invited designers; instead, those who had no way of printing the poster in their studio were sent a Type-Kit, consisting of the digital scan of twenty typefaces from the Tipoteca archive with which they could design the posters. The print would have been performed by the Tipoteca Stamperia on the basis of the indications of colors, fonts, and layout established by each graphic designer. And so it was.

Silvio Antiga (Crocetta del Montello) after the apprenticeship as a typographer in a local printshop and being employed in the prepress department of a large printing plant, in 1969 Silvio Antiga established his own printing company Grafiche Antiga. In 1995, with his three brothers, he created Tipoteca Italiana, a private foundation to preserve the knowledge of the Italian history of printing and encourage the practice of letterpress and hand binding.