Benedetta Crippa combines graphic design and ornamentation to create enchanting visual worlds

Dedicating her practice to questioning ideas of beauty, form and decoration in design, Benedetta Crippa runs her studio for ‘Graphic Design and Ornamentation’ in Stockholm, focusing on sustainable forms of practice. With some of her major creative influences sitting outside of the traditional design world, she draws inspiration for her ornamental visuals from traditional folk art, for the way it brings a “beauty free of prestige into everyday life”, she tells us. Often deconstructing modernist, ‘universal’ ideas around graphic design in her work, she is known for “introducing a new visual language free of strict categorisations”, treating design as somewhat of an “applied art” that she believes, must always be “a creative intervention that serves some kind of need”.

Working on a broad range of visual identity projects, bespoke ornamental commissions and everything in between, Benedetta likes to see herself as a generalist, with a distinct focus, however, on building visual worlds within every project that are: “beautiful, well implemented, enriching to the lives of those who experience them [...] and contribute towards social progress”, she says.

In the field of sustainable design, Benedetta teaches a course at Konstfack university in Sweden and carries out practice-based research on the subject of ‘visual sustainability’, investigating post-colonial, feminist perspectives in design in order to highlight the connections between “our visual culture, systemic power and sustainable futures”, she says. As a conversation that is often limited to materiality in design, Benedetta’s interest in sustainability lies in how we can actually implement it into the visual decisions we make as designers, “not simply through the process or the story” our design work tells. This is a subject she visually explores in works such as World of Desire, an artist book and “testimony of the expansive power of decoration” in which she celebrates visual democracy through her illustrations, reacting to the established rules and false dichotomies that have dominated the field of graphic design. In all of her reflective, decorative work, she creates new places for "visual comfort and self recognition” as a graphic designer, fulfilling her desire to “create an enchanting world worth living in”.