All form is communicative. The way in which graphic design purifies the forms of everyday life is rooted in the delicate way as the labour of the city’s debuggers feeds into the graphic design project for the consolidated visual identity of the Covilhã Design Triennial 2025, expressed in two articulated elements: its symbol and its logo.

From desire to drawing, from design to debossing. The four corners of the drawing board: desire, drawing, debuxing, design, allow us to define a precise visual narrative, the significant forms, the communicating modes available when it comes to moving forward with this graphic design project in Portugal’s snow city.

We start by recognising what we know: debossing. This is the systematic element of the present visual identity: the symbol, which interprets the pattern; the quadrant of the weaving’s visual structure, presenting a composition that articulates positives and negatives, defining the patterns of the desired fabric, in the counterpoint between the lines of the warp and the lines of the weft.

Looking at the visual orthogonality of debossing, the diverse, creative intersections of threads found in the meticulous work of Covilhã’s debossers, one tries to create a rigorous, checkered grid for the definition of the symbol of the Covilhã Design Triennial 2025, which is a metaphor, in full, of a pattern sectioned off here, representing a paradigm of wool and its enormous visual expression.

In preparing this graphic design project, one begins by drawing up the symbol. This is followed by the logo, a written, typographic representation of the name of the event, an extensive description of the consolidated visual identity of the Covilhã Design Triennial, made up of graphemes, letters only, articulating the phonemes, the mountain accent of the snow city and its territory.

A typographic alphabet is drawn, also referring to the universe of debossing, baptised ‘debuxada’, in harmony with the symbol. A set of geometric units, of rigorously articulated physiognomies, is now poured into the individual design of each letter, where similar, proportional elements shape the internal composition of each grapheme, allowing its function and its perfect suitability in the context of the consolidated visual identity of the Covilhã Design Triennial.

This typeface evokes a very particular kind of debossing writing, where composition, proportion, appropriateness and function generate an artefact of communication and dissemination; drawing out the significant forms of the city of Covilhã. In this way, future ideas proposed here are critically anticipated, in a graphic design project that integrates scientific, qualitative and quantitative knowledge. It politically and socially transforms the highland community through form and meaning, taking into account the feasibility of producing this project.

Unhais da Serra, 4th February, 2025