To reconstruct the 1920 historical style, I decide to take inspiration from the Dadaism movements and their styles. Developed in reaction to World War I, Dadaism is one of the most unconventional and Avante-Garde art and cultural movements of recent history, born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (c. 1916) and lasted until the mid 1920s. Dadaism was a very eclectic movement that explored a range of non-traditional materials, nonsensical content and satire. Beyond typically artistic media, Dada artists also investigated performance art and literature. In their magazine and manifestos, they experimented with liberating the written word from institutional conventions. The movement reached various European and American cultural centers: among the most famous were the German, the Parisian and the New Yorker ones. They share aspects, but they also differ a lot. This is why choosing just one main reference magazine seemed to me the only chance to obtain a realistic dada style, faithful to the original example.

The International Dada Archive, a scholarly resource for the study of the historic Dada movement, has been a precious support to reconstruct the Dadaist panorama and its testimonies. Going through its catalogue of periodicals, I found the Berlin-based Der DADA, a magazine edited by Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield and George Grosz. It had only three releases: the first published in June 1919, the second in December 1919 and the third and last in April 1920.

Berlin, June 1919

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Berlin, December 1919

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Berlin, April 1920

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It seemed to me full of details and interesting graphic cues, perfectly suitable to the digital format of a web page. Initially, I was undecided whether to use Der Dada or Dada magazine, born in Zurich in 1917 from the idea of Tristan Tzara, its editor, and in operation until 1920, when its head-quarter moved to Paris. Finally, the coherence of some visual aspect (as the quite homogeneous background color of the sheets of paper), harmoniously merged with graphic distortions, in Der Dada persuaded me. Thus, I decided to follow Raoul Hausmann’s trail also to design the cover image of the homepage, substitutive of the video footage, published by Rai and visible in the opening section of the website. The collage was inspired by his work “ABCD” (1923-1924), described by The Centre Pompidou of Paris, in this way: “This photomontage – a technique Raoul Hausmann started using in 1918 – exploits the many possibilities of collage. ABCD is a demonstration of the artist’s mastery of the art, the figures, objects, letters and numbers all being tightly integrated. The first four letters of the alphabet appear in the artist’s open mouth, adding a sense of sound to the purely visual, a sense supported by the scattered letters that form the word “VOCE”, voice. This produces a kind of still of a film with sound in which everything takes place at once.” I tried to replicate this sense of sound, quite significant compared to the silence to which George Flyod was force by white officer Derek Chauvin and to the scream of revenge “No Justice, No Peace” that resounded in the streets during the subsequent demonstrations. Thanks to PhotoScapeX and remove.bg, I cut out and put together pieces of photos and excerpts from newspapers, portraying the protests in Genoa during G8 Summit in 2001 and the ones broke out in USA during the summer of 2020. Finally, I overlaid the collage with some light effects in order to obtain an old-fashioned flavor. This is the result.

For what concerns the icon in the navbar to switch to Dada style, I opted for the Fountain, (New York, 1917) Duchamp’s first experiment with readymade and one among the more recognizable symbols of the movement.

I took a picture of the object and working with contrast value, I extracted the silhouette of the urinal.

I mixed more than 20 fonts, in order to hold the variety of typographic styles that coexisted in Dada newspapers. I played especially with the headers and titles. Some opensource softwares, such as Whatthefont and MyFonts , have been very helpful to match the exact fonts of some pieces of text extracted by Der Dada pages. Anyway, lots of results produced by their algorithms lead to paid packages. I settled on a compromise between high resemblance and free downloadable options. For the general body (both in the Homepage and in the Issue page), I adopted Romana BT font. For the hyperlinks, I enlarged the letter-spacing to 10px, switching to Arial font-family, in order to invoke the non-linear Dada writing system. Then, thanks to different id's, I modified titles and subtitles in the css file, experimenting different sizes, fonts and text decorations. Below some examples. I also replicated some stylistic features of DADA magazine and other official publications. The style of “The Designer”, at the end of the homepage, want to be a freely inspired replica of the title of Dadaglobe solicitation form letter signed by Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Walter Serner in November 1920.

Working on the layout was definitely the most funny part of the project. For all the wallpapers, in particular, I preferred to work on the creation of new images, rather than re-using pictures downloadeable from the internet. This has guaranteed me a not-discounted image uniformity, useful for a wide and not fixed homepage, without falling into the static of a background-color. Starting from the colors detected in the pages of Dada magazines, I created backgrounds with PhotoScapeX, on which I applied graphic disturbances such as noise reduction or some pieces of text applied with a high opacity.

I played with the borders: there are several black solid borders that frame some paragraph or images, toghether with some double borders, such as the one around the Issue's articles, and other dotted or red colored examples, scattered here and there, but always in a manner consistent with the meaning of the textual or visual content. For some sub-paragraphs, I exploited the "text-transform" function of css to rotate and translate portions of text, or the "writing-mode" function to give the sentences an unconventional direction. I reported below some cases.