There are events that become part of a school's history. The meeting with David Carson, one of the most influential graphic designers in the world, is undoubtedly one of them.

ILAS Academy had the privilege of exclusively hosting the renowned American designer in Italy for one of the ILAS Visual Communication Days, offering students, professionals, and enthusiasts a unique opportunity to engage with one of the leading figures in contemporary graphics.

The event, held at the Multicinema Modernissimo in Naples, saw the participation of over 600 people, confirming the strong international interest that Carson's work continues to generate.

The Designer Who Changed the Way We Think About Graphics

Talking about David Carson means recounting a true cultural revolution.

With his work, he challenged the traditional rules of graphic design, showing that communication does not necessarily coincide with the perfect readability of a text.

His famous statement:

"Don't confuse legibility with communication."

has become one of the most debated principles in the history of contemporary graphic design.

Before Carson, the Swiss school’s rigor, grids, typographic order, and rational layout prevailed. Carson demonstrated that emotion, intuition, and experimentation could become equally effective design tools.

For this reason, his work is considered one of the most important turning points in the history of visual communication.

The Ray Gun Phenomenon

David Carson's international fame mainly stems from Ray Gun, the magazine that in the nineties completely revolutionized editorial language.

The pages became a continuous experimental ground: overlapping fonts, deconstructed photographs, seemingly chaotic compositions, texts breaking every typographic convention.

This gave birth to what the world would later define as grunge graphic design, a style that would influence thousands of designers and profoundly change the way editorial layout is conceived.

But reducing Carson to a style would be a mistake.

As Massimo Vignelli said:

“Styles come and go. David’s design is a language, not a style.”

“Styles come and go. David’s design is a language, not a style.”

A Career Among the World's Biggest Brands

After his editorial experience, David Carson founded his own studio, David Carson Design, collaborating with some of the world's most important companies.

His clients include Nike, Levi’s, Pepsi, Ray-Ban, MTV, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Giorgio Armani, American Airlines, CNN, Kodak, Toyota, Budweiser, MGM Studios, and many other international brands.

In 2014, he received the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious global awards in the field of design.

In the same year, Apple included him among the 30 most influential Macintosh users in history, recognizing the contribution his work has made to the evolution of visual communication.

An Encounter That Left a Mark

During the seminar organized by ILAS, Carson shared his creative journey, discussing the relationship between design, intuition, photography, typography, and visual research.

More than just a conference, it was a direct exchange with one of the authors who changed the way we think about graphic design.

Students were able to hear not only the story of his most famous works but also the design method that led him to become one of the most influential designers of recent decades.

The ILAS Philosophy: Learning from the Leaders

ILAS has always built its educational path by inviting professionals who have truly contributed to writing the history of visual communication.

The presence of David Carson perfectly embodies this philosophy: offering students the opportunity to engage directly with those who have turned their work into an international reference.

Over the years, the ILAS Visual Communication Days have hosted designers, photographers, art directors, creatives, and professionals who have marked the evolution of contemporary graphic design.

The meeting with David Carson remains one of the most significant testimonies of this cultural journey, confirming ILAS's commitment to bringing to Naples the personalities who have helped change the way we see, design, and communicate through images.

"Don't confuse legibility with communication"

David Carson's philosophy is encapsulated in these few words and is the key to the revolution with which he transformed graphics.

There are great names like Neville Brody, Milton Glaser, our own Massimo Vignelli, who have shown us very beautiful, refined things and undoubtedly contributed elegance and style to the landscape of graphic design.

But there was a before and after Carson, and not many can say the same.

And hear, hear: David Carson will be in Naples on June 27th, hosted by Ilas for a free seminar, but only by reservation.

Visit David Carson's website

Photography is much more than just an image. It's a way of observing the world, interpreting it, and telling its story through a unique and personal perspective. It can emerge during a journey, from an unexpected encounter, from a detail that escapes others, or from a place we thought we knew. Every photograph holds a point of view, an emotion, a story.

ILAS Photo Contest 2026

From this idea comes the ILAS Photo Contest 2026, a competition dedicated to contemporary photography that invites photographers, enthusiasts, and authors to share their vision through the universal language of images.

The contest is open to everyone, with no age or origin limits. Professional photographers, amateurs, students, and emerging authors can participate, competing in the OPEN category. ILAS students and graduates will also have a dedicated ranking in the ILAS category, designed to highlight the talent and educational journey of the Academy's participants.

Each author can choose the expressive mode that best suits their project, participating with a single photograph or with a reportage consisting of 5 to 10 images.

Thematic Paths

There are two thematic paths to choose from.

Inner Geographies invites exploration of the journey as a personal experience, a path made of emotions, memory, and transformation, where the landscape becomes a metaphor for what happens within us.

Free Photographic Research, on the other hand, allows for maximum expressive freedom, enabling each author to develop a project without thematic constraints, following solely their own sensitivity and photographic language.

Evaluation and Prizes

The works will be evaluated by a jury composed of some of the most authoritative figures in contemporary Italian photography, alongside public voting through a transparent system reserved for verified users, thus offering a balanced comparison between professional judgment and community participation.

There are four prizes of 250 euros each, awarded in the following categories:

• Single Photo – OPEN
• Reportage – OPEN
• Single Photo – ILAS
• Reportage – ILAS

Registrations are open until September 30, 2026, and participation is completely free.

An Invitation to Participate

If you have a story to tell, a project to share, or simply a personal way of seeing the world, now is the time to let your images speak.

The ILAS Photo Contest 2026 awaits you.

GO TO THE WEBSITE

Cover photo: photograph by Serena Salerno, winner of the ILAS Photo Contest 2015.

Every now and then, a tool emerges that forces a discipline to question itself. Not because it introduces a new function, but because it suddenly makes evident a change that was already underway. The recent evolutions of Figma belong to this category. To reduce them to a simple software update would be to miss their significance. The issue is not about adding AI-based tools, nor about generating images, modifying photos, or producing vector elements through generative models. All of this is merely the most visible manifestation of a much deeper transformation: the gradual shift from software as a tool to software as a design interlocutor.

The relationship between designer and technology

For over forty years, graphic designers have built their relationship with technology through tools that, however sophisticated, remained essentially passive. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and more recently, Figma, have changed the way a project is realized, but they have never altered the nature of the design process. It was the designer who decided every step: observe, interpret, choose, build, verify. The software executed.

Today, this relationship changes. The new systems no longer just execute instructions. They produce hypotheses, suggest alternatives, anticipate solutions, generate variations. For the first time, the designer finds themselves working with tools that participate, at least in part, in the construction of the project. We are not yet facing design intelligence, but we are certainly beyond the traditional concept of software.

The role of tools in the project

This is probably why many analyses risk being misleading. People wonder if Figma will replace Illustrator, if Photoshop will lose its centrality, if InDesign will become marginal. These are understandable questions, but they belong to a now outdated logic. Every time a new technology appears, it tends to be described as the successor of the previous one. It happened with desktop publishing, with the web, with Canva, and today with artificial intelligence. Yet the history of design shows that tools rarely eliminate those that preceded them; more often, they redefine their role within a broader ecosystem.

In this perspective, Figma does not appear as a substitute for the Creative Cloud, but as the place where different disciplines begin to converge. Interface design, real-time collaboration, prototyping, interaction with code, and today, AI tools coexist in a single operational environment. It is not so much the sum of functionalities that makes it interesting, but the different way of conceiving the design process: no longer a sequence of specialized applications, but a system in which design, production, and review tend to progressively coincide.

The competence of the graphic designer

However, it would be a mistake to deduce from this evolution that the competence of the graphic designer becomes less important. On the contrary, it is the opposite. The more the production of solutions is automated, the more the value of their critical evaluation grows. If generating fifty variants takes a few seconds, the real competence no longer lies in producing a form, but in recognizing which form has design quality. It is a substantial change. For decades, we have identified professional knowledge with the ability to construct an elaborate; today, it is increasingly measured by the ability to select, argue, and above all, discard.

Design curation thus becomes a central competence. Saying “this solution works” or “this solution does not work” requires knowledge that no generative model possesses: the history of typography, visual culture, understanding of context, the relationship between form and meaning, the awareness that every graphic choice produces consequences in the perception of a message. Artificial intelligence can propose a formally correct composition; it cannot attribute intention to it.

The democratization of tools

This is where a distinction likely to characterize the profession in the coming years emerges. Artificial intelligence drastically lowers the threshold for accessing tools. Those with limited skills can achieve results unimaginable until recently. But this democratization makes the value of design culture even more evident. When technical quality tends to become uniform, what distinguishes a professional is no longer mastery of the software, but the depth of their design thinking.

For this reason, the future of graphic design will not depend on the choice between Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, or any other work environment. It will depend on the ability to use these tools without delegating the responsibility of the project to them. A software can suggest a solution. It cannot assume the cultural, ethical, and communicative responsibility of that choice.

The responsibility of the designer

Perhaps this is the most important transformation introduced by the current era of artificial intelligence. For many years, the designer has learned to use increasingly sophisticated tools. Today, they must learn something different: to direct systems capable of autonomously producing design possibilities, while keeping the responsibility of the idea intact.

The tools will continue to change. Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and software we cannot even imagine today will change again. Graphic design, however, will continue to be based on the same question that has accompanied the discipline since its origins: not how to build a form, but why that form should exist.

And it is a question that, at least for now, no artificial intelligence is yet able to answer.

A fundamental part of contemporary visual culture has dissolved the rigid separation between art, design, visual communication, and popular imagery. Images no longer exist within closed territories: they circulate through the web's flows, overlap, change function, and constantly acquire new meanings.

In this fluid scenario, a painting can adopt the visual synthesis of an advertising poster; a liturgical or votive symbol can coexist with a character from pop culture; a masterpiece from art history can be reinterpreted through the codes of comics, typography, collage, or street art. Mass culture is no longer an external territory to art but is the very ecosystem in which the work takes shape, transforms, and is enjoyed.

It is precisely within this condition of permanent contamination that Alessandro Cocchia's work is situated.

Designer, art director, and artist, Cocchia belongs to a generation for whom the boundary between high culture and popular culture no longer represents a dogmatic hierarchy to defend but a critical distance to traverse. His research stems from this continuous crossing. Painting, graphics, collage, typography, and pop imagery coexist within a language that does not seek formal purity but visual friction; not homogeneity, but stylistic collision.

The exhibition Je so’ Punk, set up in the spaces of Maschio Angioino from July 29 to August 26, makes this design method explicit. The title openly recalls the famous song by Pino Daniele, Je so’ pazzo, but the reference to punk goes beyond mere musical citation or stylistic caricature. Here, punk becomes a way of thinking and constructing images: the desire to break representational conventions, traverse heterogeneous languages, and liberate symbols from their iconographic immobility to reinsert them into new chains of meaning.

Irony as a Critical Tool

In Cocchia's work, irony never coincides with mere visual amusement or a superficial joke. It is, in every respect, a tool for semantic displacement. His compositions work because they short-circuit seemingly incompatible elements, forcing the viewer to reconsider the meaning of what they see.

Figures from art history, global pop icons, sacred figures, cartoons, and contemporary culture protagonists share the same visual space. The chronological and symbolic distance that separates them is deliberately compressed: Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, and Jan Vermeer thus collide with the Simpsons, Peppa Pig, or TV series characters.

However, this is not neutral or nostalgic citationism. Cocchia uses the memory and recognizability of the image as genuine construction material. Each symbol is chosen because it already holds a collective narrative, an emotional legacy, and a precise value in the common imagination. The artist intervenes on this layered memory, deforms it, and returns it in an unprecedented form.

It is in this gap that his work surpasses the mere decorative surface of neo-pop. The images do not merely reproduce the symbols of mass culture but highlight their ambivalence: their ability to generate desire, identification, consensus, and consumption.

Contamination as Method and Design Rigor

In Cocchia's work, the term contamination does not indicate a generic juxtaposition of styles and languages but describes a precise transformative process. To contaminate means to alter the deep nature of the elements brought into contact.

When a sacred icon is traversed by the communicative synthesis of advertising, or when a masterpiece of art history meets the language of cartoons, neither element remains identical to itself. The traditional symbol loses part of its distance; the pop image acquires new conceptual density.

In this process, Cocchia's training in visual communication plays a crucial role. His works constantly reveal a solid design architecture. Nothing is left to chance, even when the final outcome seems guided by the immediacy of gesture or the expressive freedom of collage.

The calibrated arrangement of elements, the management of color contrast, the syntactic relationship between text and figure, and the ability for visual synthesis derive from long practice in the field of visual design. Cocchia's artistic production is not a separate parenthesis from his profession as a designer but represents a natural extension: where graphics organize and structure the image, art intervenes to introduce tension, paradox, and contradiction.

Naples as a Visual Archive

Naples occupies a central position in the artist's research but is stripped of any folkloristic or scenic rhetoric. The city is configured as a vast open-air visual archive, a living stratification of religious symbols, popular characters, musical memories, votive shrines, sports icons, and urban life rhythms.

San Gennaro, Pino Daniele, and Diego Armando Maradona do not appear as mere portraits but become symbols through which a community defines its belonging and constructs its image.

Cocchia works on these symbols without transforming them into relics. He removes them from celebratory routine and reinserts them into the circuit of the present. His Naples is not a city folded on its past but a porous organism capable of metabolizing external influences and returning them in original forms. It is precisely this innate ability to absorb and rework complex codes that makes Neapolitan culture profoundly punk: intolerant of rigid definitions, allergic to formal purity, and in continuous self-reinvention.

The Image Between Art Autonomy and Graphic Synthesis

A key aspect of Cocchia's work concerns overcoming the historical separation between the expressive autonomy of art and the persuasive function of commercial graphics. While modern culture has often built a wall between these two fields, contemporary complexity shows their daily interpenetration.

Cocchia operates precisely in the contact zone between these worlds. His works possess the impact and synthesis of an advertising poster but deny immediate resolution, maintaining the complexity and polysemy typical of a work of art. They are attractive and familiar images that capture the gaze only to disorient it through elements of disturbance and dissonance.

His experience as an art director allows him to master the mechanisms of perception and attention. However, instead of subjugating them to a univocal commercial message, Cocchia transforms them into critical material: the image seduces the observer and, at the same time, challenges their way of seeing.

BeThatCool: Ready-Made and the Desecration of Art

Among the most significant works in the exhibition is BeThatCool, a piece where Marcel Duchamp and Edvard Munch are evoked within a provocative framework. The bidet here assumes the role of a pivot around which an irreverent reflection on the art system and its mechanisms of fetishization revolves.

The reference to Duchamp's ready-made is direct, but Cocchia does not stop at archival citation. He shifts the axis towards a more popular and immediate language: the bidet is metaphorically presented as the “savior of art from shit-art,” in a short circuit intertwining irony, high culture, and institutional critique.

The presence of the real object, inviting the public to sit and interact, redraws the relationship between work and spectator. The installation transcends mere contemplative enjoyment to become an experiential device. The visitor becomes an active part of the work; through the photographic shot and sharing on digital channels, the piece crosses the boundaries of the exhibition hall and enters a new circuit of images and shares.

The Work in the Age of Sharing

Even the inflatable sculpture in the shape of horns, conceived as the symbolic installation of the exhibition, responds to this same logic. The superstitious gesture of Neapolitan tradition is decontextualized and transformed into an environmental installation, a plastic element, and a media scenography.

This multiplicity of planes reveals the contemporary nature of the image, which today does not live only in the physical place of exhibition but multiplies through personal devices and network flows. Every visitor, photographing and sharing, produces a variation of the work, inserting it into their personal narrative.

Cocchia consciously integrates this mechanism into the project: social sharing is not a promotional appendix of the exhibition but a constitutive phase of its functioning. The work continues to live beyond the walls of Maschio Angioino, rearticulating in the images produced by the public.

Neo-Pop as a Key to Understanding the Contemporary

Framing Alessandro Cocchia within the realm of neo-pop is correct, provided that this label is not reduced to a mere repertoire of bright colors and famous icons. In his work, neo-pop becomes a way of reading contemporary society.

It is a language founded on the awareness that our experience of reality is constantly filtered by a vast repository of pre-existing images. There is no entirely neutral view of a symbol: we always recognize it through the reproductions, variations, and stories that preceded it.

Cocchia works precisely on this stratification of memory. He does not invent icons from scratch but intervenes on images already rich in meaning, altering their context to reveal new levels of interpretation. The citation ceases to be a passive homage and becomes a critical act: moving an image means changing its value and revealing what habit had made invisible.

A Declaration of Visual Freedom

Je so’ Punk thus stands as a statement of expressive freedom. The freedom to reject rigid hierarchies between languages, juxtaposing art history with television culture, the sacred symbol with advertising communication, the local root with a global vision.

This freedom does not equate to the absence of rules but arises from a deep understanding of visual design. Cocchia's punk is not the anarchic negation of method but the conscious choice of someone who knows the grammars of communication and decides to bend, challenge, and redefine them.

In this sense, the exhibition at Maschio Angioino offers itself as a clear cultural position: it demonstrates that contemporary art can retain the immediacy of mass culture without becoming superficial, maintaining its complexity and critical charge intact.

Biography
Alessandro Cocchia has been a ILAS graphic design instructor since 2013

In September, students of the ILAS Advertising – Art Copy Course will have the opportunity to engage with one of the key figures in the history of Italian communication. For two months, Lele Panzeri will conduct the Art Direction module, bringing to the classroom not only technical skills but also a wealth of experience gained over more than fifty years at the highest professional levels.

In the landscape of Italian advertising, there are professionals who have interpreted their work with talent. And then there are figures who have helped write the history of this discipline. Lele Panzeri undoubtedly belongs to this second category.

An art director, creative director, advertising director, television author, writer, and journalist, Panzeri has been a leading figure in the evolution of Italian communication, working for some of the most important national and international agencies and creating campaigns that have entered the collective imagination. He was among the founders of the Art Directors Club Italiano (ADCI), where he also served as president, and in 2022 he was inducted into the prestigious ADCI Hall of Fame, an honor reserved for personalities who have left an indelible mark on Italian creativity. (⁠ADCI blog)

Throughout his career, he has collaborated with brands such as Ferrarelle, Golia, Pioneer, Il Manifesto, Veuve Clicquot, and many others, earning some of the most important international advertising awards, including Clio Awards, Cannes Lions, and dozens of ADCI awards. He was also the founder of the historic agency FCA/SBP, one of the entities that most influenced Italian advertising in the 1980s and 1990s. (⁠Design in Town)

Art Direction is learned by working with those who built it

Within the ILAS Advertising Course, the Art Direction module represents one of the most important moments of the educational journey. It's not just about learning to design a layout or choose a typeface.

Art Direction means learning to transform an idea into a visual message capable of moving, persuading, and staying in people's memories. It means understanding the relationship between image and text, between aesthetics and strategy, between creativity and market.

For this reason, the presence of Lele Panzeri takes on extraordinary value.

Students will not only study the great cases of Italian advertising: they will hear them recounted directly by those who conceived them, understanding the design method, the mistakes, the insights, the client relationship, and the path that turns an idea into a memorable campaign.

A cultural heritage before a professional one

The educational philosophy of ILAS has always been to entrust training to professionals who continue to be a reference point for the sector.

With Lele Panzeri, this choice reaches one of its most significant examples.

His presence does not only represent the teaching of a technical discipline but the encounter with a culture of communication built in the years when modern Italian advertising was born. An approach that focuses on ideas, the ability to observe society, the power of synthesis, and the value of creative design.

These are teachings that remain extraordinarily relevant today, even in the era of artificial intelligence: because tools change, but the quality of a project continues to depend on the strength of the idea that generates it.

An experience that goes beyond the lesson

During the two months of activity, students will have the opportunity to develop creative concepts, analyze historical campaigns, engage with real briefs, and receive feedback directly from one of Italy's most important creative directors.

It's a type of experience that can hardly be replaced by books or tutorials: the value arises from direct interaction with someone who has lived advertising from the inside, helping to define its languages, methods, and professional standards.

The tradition of excellence continues

The collaboration between ILAS and Lele Panzeri has deep roots. Already in 2006, Panzeri was the protagonist of a memorable seminar organized by ILAS, during which he revealed to students the behind-the-scenes of the profession and the daily work within major communication agencies. An encounter still remembered by many former students. (⁠Ilas)

His return is therefore the natural continuation of a collaboration that has always had a single objective: to offer students the opportunity to learn directly from the protagonists of Italian communication.

For those who wish to become art directors, creative directors, or advertising professionals, attending Lele Panzeri's lessons means engaging with one of the figures who have helped define the history of creativity in our country.

Because advertising is not only studied in manuals.

Advertising is learned, above all, from those who made it great.