We told you we'd be back. The Pirelli archive is one of those places you don't visit once and walk away satisfied. We went deeper, and the wall is full again.

The first feature barely scratched the surface. That's not false modesty. The Pirelli archive is vast and the further in you go the more specific and extraordinary it gets. Where the first round was about the broad sweep of it, the wordmark, the poster work, the Bauhaus geometry, this one goes closer. The details that reveal themselves when you spend more time with a body of work that was never made to be consumed quickly.

What keeps drawing us back is the typography decisions. 

Not just what typefaces were chosen but how they were used in relation to space and image. The way a thick serif logotype sits against a field of flat colour with the kind of hit that suggests nobody in the room entertained an alternative. The letterspacing in the campaign work from the 1960s and 70s looks like it was drawn by hand rather than set, which in many cases it was. 

That level of considered making shows in the output in a way that digital production still hasn't fully replicated.

The poster series is where the archive rewards the most patient looking. Pirelli understood something about the relationship between speed and stillness that their visual work kept returning to. A tyre is a kinetic object. The posters that communicate this best are often the ones with the least movement in them. A single curve. A shadow. A wordmark placed with absolute economy. The restriction in those decisions is the design lesson worth taking back to the studio.

We said the archive was proof that real design doesn't age. Standing in front of another wall full of it, we're not changing that position.

Shot of the good stuff.