Course Topics
Football fandom is a cultural phenomenon deeply woven into the history of cities, shaped by their social, political and urban transformations. Ultra groups, in particular, are one of the most layered and intense expressions of collective identity in contemporary culture: a system of values, rituals and symbols built over time, rooted in place and shared memory. Every chant, every banner, every color carries the weight of specific events, historic rivalries, local belonging and social tensions that have defined the group across the years. This is the starting point of the course, which takes a real ultra group as its subject, with its history, its aesthetic and its established visual world. Students are asked to dive into this universe, analyzing its identity and visual dynamics to develop an individual project of complete visual identity: from logo to color palette, from typography to physical applications like banners, scarves and merchandise. The course gives students the tools to build a solid design methodology, one that can be applied to briefs of all kinds. Through lectures, we introduce both the theoretical foundations of visual identity and the hands-on skills needed to develop its individual components: building and visualizing a concept, working with expressive typography, making chromatic and compositional choices that shape the character of a visual system. At the core of this journey is the relationship between cultural context and visual decision-making: how a group’s history, values and territory translate into a coherent and effective system of signs. Special attention is given to the relationship between medium and language, exploring how a visual message shifts in form and meaning depending on whether it appears on a screen, a piece of fabric or a wall. Alongside the design process, the course works on developing critical and lateral thinking, essential for approaching a brief with openness and curiosity. This means learning to read content in depth, uncovering its narrative potential and turning it into coherent visual work, even when the starting material feels familiar or already defined. Lateral thinking becomes a tool for finding unexpected connections between history, identity and visual form, and for imagining an aesthetic that feels both recognizable and fresh.

Teaching format
Frontal lectures, open discussions, practical exercises, reviews, and presentations

Course Topics
Starting from the study of football fandom as a cultural, social, and visual phenomenon, the module invites students to observe how the collective identities of supporter groups are constructed not only through physical objects — banners, scarves, flags, chants, graffiti, clothing — but also within digital environments, online archives, videos, memes, GIFs, social media platforms, maps, visual databases, and forms of digital circulation. The course provides a framework for understanding football fandom as a “bottom-up” cultural practice, capable of producing signs, narratives, rituals, and collective memories. From this perspective, the module engages with visual culture studies, sociological analyses of fandom, and the historiographical turn that recognizes everyday practices, popular forms, and collective movements as fundamental sources for understanding a historical period. Fan cultures thus become a privileged field of observation for interrogating the relationship between image, belonging, urban space, conflict, memory, and representation. Within this framework — and particularly from a historical perspective — attention may also be given to the self-produced editorial and communicative forms that have historically accompanied fan cultures, youth subcultures, and, more broadly, underground cultures: fanzines, bulletins, flyers, posters, stickers, photocopied materials, informal archives, and independent publications. These objects, often marginal in relation to official circuits of communication, instead constitute fundamental devices for understanding how a group constructs its own voice, organizes its memory, disseminates internal codes, and produces autonomous forms of representation. Their study also makes it possible to connect the graphic practices of football fandom with a broader genealogy of antagonistic, amateur, and underground visual cultures, in which graphic design acts as a tool for collective expression, belonging, and counter-narration. Football fandom is a specific and apparently limited case study, yet one with much broader ambitions: it serves as a useful example for arguing for a possible repositioning of graphic design, its object of study, its competences, and its critique, placing it in a position of primary importance within the field of knowledge. In other words, this is an attempt to affirm the potential and the contribution that graphic design can offer in understanding and making explicit phenomena of significant social and historical interest. Through practical exercises and moments of critical analysis, students will be guided in collecting, organizing, and interpreting visual and media materials related to a real supporter group, and will be invited to practice — albeit in an introductory form — modes of observation and participatory ethnography. The work may include the construction of digital archives accompanied by timelines, maps, data visualizations, or videos, as well as animated GIFs, social media content, audiovisual micro-narratives, or other digital artefacts consistent with the identity system developed in the main course. Particular attention will be devoted to the transition from research material to design project: how to transform data, images, slogans, codes, geographies, and rituals into a conscious, legible, and critically grounded digital communication system. Understanding digital media as environments in which visual identities are produced, distributed, and negotiated, students will therefore be invited to reflect on how visual language changes when it moves from the stadium to the screen, from fabric to the feed, from chant to video clip, from banner to GIF, from collective gesture to data visualization.

Teaching format
Lectures; discussions based on the assigned readings; project reviews; presentations

Course Topics
What is human communication, how does it arise, and how does it work? Introduction to visual semiotics: sign theory and graphic design theory, methods of visualization. Basic principles of Gestalt psychology Media, sign carriers, and forms of signs in soccer that are publicly worn and displayed: Flags (car flags, table flags, pennants), banners, scarves, caps and hats, shirts and hoodies (category: clothing), face paint, keychains, stickers, horns, megaphones, pyrotechnics, mascots, graffiti, tattoos, games, and video games, etc. What are “fan merchandise”? What is a “gadget”? Balls, keychains, mugs, bedding, video games, PlayStation The language used: What do the abbreviations mean, e.g., F. T. W.? What are markers, and how do you interpret the codes of abbreviations, e.g., 1312? What are slogans or chants, and how do they foster a sense of identity within groups? Chants and songs as forms of expression. What is meant by fan culture? Associations, scenes, and clubs as forms of collective passions and identities. Ultras and critical soccer fans as a social movement: history, goals, group rituals, behavioral patterns, codes, ritualizations, and myth-making. The forms of communication in “normal” groups do not differ from those in extreme or subcultures when it comes to identity formation and signs of belonging. E.g., religious groups and societies, associations, gangs, etc. Mainstream cultures and subcultures: norms and social acceptance, power structures, dogmas, control, and deviant behavior, protest as a means of expression.

Teaching format
Lectures, readings, seminar discussions, presentations