
Rather than sketching by
hand, as he often does,
Sonnoli began the design
process using drawing soft-
ware after writing and reflect-
ing on the client’s brief. His
affinity for the system-based
identity work of Swiss design
pioneer, Karl Gerstner, directed
him toward the idea of varia-
tion within consist restraints,
and this was corroborated by a
chance encounter with a book
of French poems
—
published
cut apart, line by line, and
therefore almost infinitely vari-
able. Sonnoli perceived this
idea as appropriate to the con-
cept of music and began to
explore sets of symbols that
could be recombined to make
a kind of variable logo. Unlike
conventional thinking in ...