Tania Prill & Alberto Vieceli

Jan-Tschichold Award 2007

And every book so different
MICHAEL GUGGENHEIMER

The jury for the The most beautiful Swiss books competition has awarded the Jan Tschischold Prize, a sum of 15,000 francs, to the Zurich graphic and book design team Tania Prill and Alberto Vieceli. This prize gives the Swiss Federal Departm ent of Home Affairs (FDHA) the chance to award a prize to these two designers for outstanding achievements in book design.

There are books that make you suspect who designed them as soon as you look at the cover. You open the book and find you were right, because you have already come across similar approaches by the same studio. It’s very different when the books are designed by Tania Prill and Alberto Vieceli. Tania Prill and Alberto Vieceli do not keep on working in single style of their own, they adapt themselves to every job, every subject and every author each time they design a book. They have a complete mastery of more classical book design, but also acknowledge current trends and are receptive to outside stimuli. The books they design can appeal to a wide range of readers, not just in terms of content, but in form at, in the typographical design, picture presentation, tactile qualities and weight. Tania Prill and Alberto Vieceli, who have been working together in their visual communication studio since 2001, do not just design books: at first they can’t just think what the first job they did together was. And then they do remember: they first worked together on an exhibition of 30 posters called Stand der Dinge that the City of Zurich’s building department had set up in the EWZ to provide information about housing. Their present project involves work on typographic design for the texts accompanying an exhibition on Swiss diplomacy in the Swiss National Library in Bern.