ABOUT DAVIDE SOZIO, OR JIMI JUMBO
Davide Sozio is a young and vibrant Italian graphic designer who admits a very contemporary reality: “Despite preferring hand drawing, I had to recognize the relevance of digital design nowadays.”
Davide, or Jimi Jumbo, also likes to combine drawings and post-production digital techniques with photography, a medium he finds inspiring to his art and developed while traveling throughout the world. He considers all the people he met, stories he listened to or experienced for himself, a significant contribution to shaping his style.
After a degree in Visual Arts (Academy of Fine Arts, Venice, 2017), he applied to an MA in Art Curatorship at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he could deepen his studies in postcolonial and art literature.
These studies led him to discover his most significant interest in using art to explore social debates through a critical approach.
Davide combines his traveling stories to a broader vision of a western society, his focal point of critique. “I started using a critical approach while observing and representing modern society. It forced me to question some of the western cultural beliefs and thoughts,” he explains to Hue&Eye.
COLONIAL PSYHCO – ALBUM COVER FOR THE WALKING WHO
His most recent project as graphic director for The Walking Who’s upcoming album Colonial Psycho, is dated 2020 and it’s a sharp representation of his values. The Walking Who are a band which head member Rohin Brown – based in Prague – aims at exploring alternative musical paths through sounds and instruments in contrast to the western identity and traditional music. He is now recording in the studio using old Soviet synthesizers and guitars. The main focus of the project is to question through rebellious approaches the western culture supremacy. “What I did as the graphic director of the project was to transfer the musical humor behind this concept to the illustrations for social media usage. The challenging thing that I had to face was my ability to transmit through art the idea of questioning current western culture supremacy.”
The album cover is a colored pencil drawing inspired by Hector Garrido‘s illustration in the ’80s. As the head member of the band was looking for the music concept to twist the modern idea of western sounds into a non-western psycho-pop album, based upon Soviet synthesizers, Jimi Jumbo switched the role of a western hero from predatory to prey. Instead of saving humanity (as in Garrido’s illustrations), the antihero goes towards the explosion to embrace it.
Another exciting part of this project is the typography that Jimi Jumbo created explicitly for it. Inspired by old Soviet fonts and geometric visuals, he first designed the letter fonts by hand to then digitally manipulate them.
PHOTOGRAPHY
As mentioned already, another valued Davide Sozio’s interest is photography, a relevant tool that he will often combine with hand drawing and post-production to finalize his works. He considers the images on his website as part of a personal series, mostly taken during his numerous travels. “Having purchased many bus tickets around the world and listening to all kinds of people’s stories and voices helped me enrich the content of what I do.”
To follow Jimi Jumbo, go here.
