COMINGOuT

Promotion of a regional wine brand

Studio of Publishing Graphics

>Emilia Pyza

I am a graphic designer. Or rather: I draw, cut out, look around, wheel and deal, eat, take pictures, count, travel, read, make a mess, talk, spoil, repair, paint, scan, arrange, adjust, sleep only a little, think a lot. I create.

>Professor Lech Majewski

Good taste shapes preferences. That phrase describes Emilia Pyza’s piece in a nutshell. It is dedicated to providing graphic designs for the quality wines from Wojciech Włodarczyk’s Pańska Góra vineyard located near Kazimierz Dolny.
It is well-known that Poland is not exactly overflowing wine; all the more reason for enjoying the fact the grapes for this wine are cultivated near Kazimierz Dolny. Winemakers from the region should take a closer look at Emilia Pyza’s work.
This piece, executed with great artistic skill, referring to the tradition of the region, its artistic and cultural values, is at the same time very bold and innovative. Graphic design work for alcoholic beverages, wine in particular, is ruled by certain conventions, often limiting the designer’s options. Emilia Pyza’s proposal breaks these schemes, while maintaining an appropriate manner and style for addressing such a noble product. And it seems to me that with her design she has complimented and augmented the fine wine from Wojciech Włodarczyk’s vineyard.

> Professor Maciej Buszewicz

Before Phileas Fogg set off from London on his adventurous journey around the world, which was supposed to be completed in eighty days, the fashion for journeys into the unknown was already at least a hundred years old.
The Grand Tour in fact originated in Britain, where young, adventurous nobles and explorers or brawlers, it is hard to tell, hungry for novelty, began their trips. We know very well how James Cook’s voyage ended. Charles Darwin was slightly luckier.
Jules Gabriel Verne published his novel Around the World in Eighty Days in 1871, only a few years after the opening of the Suez Canal, which dramatically shortened the sea voyage from Europe to India and further east. The world shrank and the sun never set on the British Empire. The development of technology, cartography, transportation – this all allowed British gentlemen to take up the challenge.
When you flick through the book designed by Emilia Pyza, you get the impression that she participated in hectic preparations for Fogg’s trip. Maybe his valet Passepartout provided Emilia with the necessary materials, maps, plans, railway timetables, ship tickets, and only Detective Fix knows how much more. Passepartout shared with Emilia Pyza the original drawings, probably made by Fogg himself, or maybe it was the humble valet who was the one to draw these compelling images of animals and plants, previously unknown, encountered during their voyage.
Jokes aside, Emilia went through hundreds of Internet archives in search of material for the book. Beautifully composed, often concealed in folding pages and pull-out maps, all these elements show the reader what such a journey might have looked like. Emilia did not yield to the temptation, a slightly anachronistic one, to show what Phileas Fogg looked like or present an image of hot air balloon travel. Nothing like that. With her book design Emilka tries to convince us that such a journey could have actually taken place and that she has found material evidence, maybe not of the trip as such (as it still is a product of Jules Verne’s literary
imagination) but that it was possible. She created a beautiful book, in a style typical of the genre of traveller’s tales and with slightly sentimental typography, reminiscent of reportages from other trips: Olgierd Budrewicz’s journeys published
in “Przekrój” in the late 1950’s.
There is no choice now but to open the book, start the browser and step by step, following in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg and Emilia Pyza, begin planning such a journey anew. Bon voyage!