Bis Dixit

Pere Alvaro and Alex Gifreu met at design school ten years ago and they started the design consultancy Bis Dixit seven years later, in the northern town of Figueras. Self-confessed followers of the 1964 First Things First Manifesto, Gifreu and Alvaro believe in ‘using visual communication to create a better way to solve problems rather than just to sell products’.

‘Of course, we work for the industry, but most of our projects are connected to the social and cultural context,’ says Alvaro. The group’s clients include The Museum of History in Catalunya, the Figueras Dali Museum and the Contemporary Centre of Culture in Barcelona.

‘We really love typography and that’s why we developed fonts for some of our projects. We think that “everybody needs a suite”, and that’s why we try to create fonts which express better what we want to communicate in a specific project. Bis also works on what the partners call Non Profit Projects, the first of which was its book Flammable Typeface, in which designers from 11 countries used some of their type families. All communication between the designers was conducted via the Internet. Spanish design groups which collaborated on the project include Ipsum Planet – which also publishes the fashionable magazine Neo2 – and Typerware.

Other NPPs include 86400, a catalogue and an exhibition based on the amount of time a creative mind is able to reason and Type x, an interactive catalogue in which the communicative potential of type is explored. Bis has been awarded five Spanish Laus prizes and nine Anuaria.