The plaquettes were small publications, generally in the form of a notebook, which Ricard Giralt Miracle (see earlier post) sent to his clients and friends as Christmas greetings or notifications of the summer holiday period during which the pioneer closed his workshop Filograf (see earlier post).
As Giralt Miracle himself stated about the plaquettes, they ‘have been the element which has served as a pretext for me to greet or visit customers. … I don’t believe in my powers of persuasion as a salesman, and what I have done has been to produce a few creative pieces and send them to everyone who I wanted to be my customers, and if they already were, to my friends.’ In short, a primitive form of what we call marketing today.
The great charm of the plaquettes lay in the fact that they were works of free creation which reflected the designer’s sensibilities, as he was able to employ both creative resources of enormous beauty and his knowledge of graphic arts techniques, using printing – images printed over images as superimposed layers – as well as different materials – from coloured tissue paper to card in saturated colours – and binding systems with raffia ribbon in some cases.
In the years 1971, 1973 and 1975, Ricard Giralt Miracle designed and printed – in a 21×18.5 centimetre format – three plaquettes which in a certain fashion made up a series in itself. The first of these was a tribute to the engraver Enric-Cristofol Ricart with texts by Josep Pla. In 1973, the subject was five poems written by Joan Brossa, accompanied by drawings by Antoni Tàpies. In the summer of 1975 Joan Miró illustrated the poem ‘És quam dormo que hi veig clar’ by J. V. Foix as a cordial holiday announcement in which friends of Filograf were informed that the workshop, studio and offices would be closed for three weeks in the month of August.
The images included in this post are from these three refined pieces, which give an idea of Giralt Miracle’s sensibilities as a designer and his ability to involve the most important figures in Catalan culture in the projects of the self-styled Filograf Institute of Graphic Art.