“My name is Giulia but everybody calls me Juls”.
Juls Criveller is an all-round visual designer. Specialized in hand lettering and illustration, she also engages in graphic design, murales, sign painting and more. She curated several artistic projects that saw her front-row as an art-director, took part to a live painting and organized hand lettering classes. Juls has been a freelance artist since 2017.
Hi Juls, welcome to the pages of Inside Venice! Can you tell us what sparked your interest for the illustration and graphic world?
I do think my passion for illustration was born with me. Since when I can remember, I have always drawn a lot and was surrounded by colours.
Different people influenced my way of interpreting illustration. From my mother, a sewer, I took my passion for the material, fabrics and colours. From my elementary school Italian teacher I took the fixation on calligraphy and fountain pens. The rest was done by school and education. It is exactly my educational path that bonded me so intensely to Venice: I spent two years at the International School of Graphics, where I discovered the island in a new, different way and fell madly in love with it.
In the last years I began teaching classes and found out that, somehow, imparting your passion to people can be the most powerful of fuels.
Among the works you had the most fun with, you often mentioned hand lettering. Will you tell us about it?
Hand lettering is a very particular discipline, because it deals with the alphabets’ letters as they were shapes that could express their own illustrative style. I discovered this world more or less seven years ago, when calligraphy’s revival in Italy and just begun. I have always loved practicing a good handwriting, but when I found out I could merge calligraphy and drawing; well, that was where my actual professional path started. I enjoy working on paper sketches to then pass on to a bigger scale project, and finally on the different materials: fabrics, metal, walls… A little bit of everything!
My sign painting work for Osteria Toniolo, a typical osteria in Treviso, was an important occasion that came during a time which seemed to lack them: the first lockdown. When they asked me to recreate the Osteria’s sign, both respecting the original one and renewing it with a kind of lettering that could still reflect its historical identity, I couldn’t wait to put my hands on it. I hand-painted it completely and today it got back to its place.
Or again Rimini beautification is an upgrading project of some areas in the city of Rimini: in this case I took on the decoration of the cabins of the beach, under the ferris wheel.
Juls
