Coolness: Happycentro

The talented creative crew at Italian studio Happycentro delved deep into the history of ‘cool’ in their recent lettering work for German philosophy magazine Hohe Luft. The result? A beautifully crafted paper-cut project with serious attitude.

Happycentro researched the concept and discovered that while ‘cool’ is seemingly a modern idea, it can be traced back to the Greek school of Hellenistic philosophy, in which a person “claims distance and detachment from everyday events”.

The studio worked both meanings into its final design for Hohe Luft. While the typography evokes the modern depiction of ‘cool’ through it’s slick handcrafted style, an icy undercurrent exists through the inclusion of dictionary definitions showing fragments of words like ‘stoic’, ‘detachment’ and ‘Afro-American’, recalling the concept's origin.

“'Cool' is for us is something astonishing from which you can sense an underlying world made of dense curiosity, awareness and passion,” says Happycentro’s Ilaria Roglieri.

The studio’s favourite part of the design? “The double S!”