Hi Studio brings teletext back into our lives, in print

Hi Studio, founded by designers Megi Zumstein and Claudio Baradun are excellent, excellent book makers. It is not just us who are devoted fans of their publication designs, winning several awards in the ten-year-long practice such as the prestigious Most Beautiful Swiss Books, 100-best-posters Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Prize of the Slovak Design Centre, to name a just a few.

What makes Hi Studio’s design characteristics so appealing is that each of their book designs feature a considered design approach with a slight element of humour that makes it feel relatable. An example of this is Meyer Spricht von Gratiskaffe created by a former studio mate Luca Schenardi, which brings teletext back into our lives in a piece of nostalgia-filled design. “One day he realised that the teletext on his tv was working very strangely,” Claudio from the studio explains. It mixed headlines and content from different channels and generated new (fake) news.”

This muddled narrative became the basis of the book, taking photographs of the new content and generating sketches from the headlines. “He did around 800 of these teletext transcribes and sketches and then we edited about 150 of them into the book,” says Claudio. “We decided to do all the design looking like teletext, which is also a strange mix with his handmade typography and sketches, but it fits very well.

Printed with just six colours on glossy paper “to give it this RGB-tv feel,” the sketches remain black and white creating a paper stock and styles mishmash, much like the original teletext titles which inspired the book.