Peter Bella

Peter Bella is an artist, designer, and a design educator. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art and Graphic Design at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). He has taught a variety of design curriculum ranging from branding and advertising to typography as well as packaging to graphic design history. Beyond his academic career, Bella has accrued more than twenty years as a professional designer with design experience encompassing public relations, advertising, marketing, publications design, and freelance design.

Bella believes the humanistic revolution is upon us. He identifies the emergence of the handmade movement as it has slowly gained popularity over the last decade, which is fueled by designers, clients, and customers returning to the roots of craft. This humanistic revolution promotes aesthetics that values the spirit of human touch and human design with a fusion of phenomenology and experiential purpose at its core. For clarity, phenomenology focuses on sensory qualities from the first-person point of view—such as seeing, hearing, etc.—in the pursuit of meaning. These experiences empower and give value to human connections.

The latest endeavours of People of Print member Peter Bella embody design thinking and the human experience within visual communication design and the responsibilities it carries within society focusing on how it personifies the humanistic aesthetic, the human experience, and the virtues and obligation design carries within society. His aspirations are to expose audiences to new ideas and perspectives within design and typography while questioning established conventions in a historical, technological, social, and cultural context. In doing so Bella suggests opportunities for emergent practices within design and typography through its application and relation to these principles.

Bella’s creative endeavour, ‘Typology of Typography: typographic communication in sculptural form,’ suggests there is an un-attachable universal synthesis connecting societal influences to the design and application of typography in visual communication presenting an ideology that typographic form can exist, and more importantly communicate, in three-dimensional space. Thus, signifying typography can be articulated and understood as a sculptural form. ‘Grimm & Grotesk: a theoretical connotation of the grotesque,’ suggests an expressive bond of the bizarre between the written word and the typographic manifestation. Likewise, ‘Humanistic Experiential Methodologies as Design Mechanism’ suggests a universal synthesis connecting humanism and societal influences through design.

When it comes to the relationship between form and content in current communication design perspectives, Bella feels strongly that we once lived in a world where communication design was about the form of communication — meaning, what form does it take? — as in form follows function. As that is still true; he also feels it has become much more. Bella states, “in communication design, the designer needs to consider not only the form and the content but also the context in which we are designing. Factors such as integrating innovation, the experience, socioeconomics, psychographics, etc. are just as meaningful — if not more than — as typography, composition, structure, imagery, colour, and so on within design. Simply, design can be a purposeful creation of value in a society.”

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