This scene might be set on another planet or in a distant galaxy. It’s a dark, starry night. Before a background of crystal spikes and alien rock formations rises a radioactive-red, striped sun, and a lighthouse is flashing intermittently. Following the light’s incredibly fast pace, colorful Goto glasses rhythmically appear, advancing and disappearing over a checkered neon-lit floor.
It might well be a hallucination, something you dream of at night, or a vaporwave version of Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness. But it’s one of the animated GIFs that Laguna~B used to send via newsletter in the first years after Marcantonio took over his mother’s business. Pixel T—a pseudonym for Tommaso Cazzaro, digital artist and friend who worked as a creative consultant at the company from 2017 to 2022—created this animation in August 2017. Titled Crunchy August, the artwork—which was recently recovered from our digital archive among dozens of others—was part of our discontinued GIF of the Month series. Before a more traditional newsletter format took over our communications in 2021, the GIFs were a widely loved monthly appointment—featuring our glasses (or parts of them, like in the artwork below, dedicated to the Tropicana collection) in surreal scenographies that revealed a funnier, humorous side of our products.
The GIFs are the most visible manifestations of the new direction that Marcantonio and his young team had established: a rebellion against what Tommaso says they perceived as a “dusty, nostalgic world,” with a lot of creative potential yet to be unleashed. “Marie Brandolini had always communicated her brand in a genuine, contemporary way, and we felt that, in this transitioning phase, we needed to follow that blueprint and reinterpret it our own way.”
Tommaso and Marcantonio had been friends since they were thirteen, having spent their teenage years together skating and writing graffiti. They reunited in 2017, when Marcantonio had moved back to Venice after years abroad, and Tommaso had left the design studio where he was working to pursue a freelance career. “Everything started when Marcantonio asked me for simple graphic design services for Laguna~B: they needed business cards, flyers, things like that. From there we began brainstorming.” They realized they shared a desire to “express different perspectives of the city—through the eyes of young people—and therefore of the creative and productive sides of Murano.” They were guided by enthusiasm and an urge to invent something new. “We liked to experiment, without the fear of making mistakes.”
Together, they began to lay the foundations of a new Laguna~B aesthetic, coining a language that was spontaneous, young, and irreverent. It translated into the “punchy, flashy GIFs,” which Tommaso designed, interpreting the mood of the month. One titled Critical July (with a typeface that could well be out of a vintage horror movie) was a collage of pictures from a research trip to L.A. and Seattle, where Marcantonio and Tommaso had visited Pilchuck Glass School and Dale Chihuly’s museum. “We wanted to tell stories behind each of our communications, and avoid being boring at any cost.”
Back in 2017, animated GIFs weren’t conventional means of communication at all in traditional marketing, especially when it came to Murano glass. But they were dynamic, short, and more visually impactful than static jpegs. Subscribers would receive them with no accompanying text. “We weren’t great writers, and we had a lot of creative chaos behind us. In the GIFs, we found a way to express our inspirations and aesthetics in a spontaneous and rebellious way.” Spicy February, from 2017, was the result of an experiment with some colorful LEDs Marcantonio had bought. “We began playing along, shooting Laguna~B collections under pulsing red, green, and blue lights.” The result is a stroboscopic sequence of slides that should be preceded by a warning to photosensitive observers.
Discussing the GIFs of the Month series with Pixel T illuminates the human dynamics regulating the activities of Laguna~B at the time—still a small, familiar company–and the mood permeating the office: intimate, chaotic, inventive. (Somehow, even in its present larger, more structured version, the spirit hasn’t changed.) To make Icy November, an artwork featuring Goto glasses emerging from melting ice, “I spent six hours waiting for the ice to melt in the office.”
Tommaso insists that he wasn’t an art director (he hates the word director because it sounds authoritarian, he says) but rather a “catalyst,” a translator of Marcantonio’s ideas. “My creative work also involved turning Marcantonio’s enthusiasm into visual and conceptual outputs.” He points out how Laguna~B has always been the work of a team rather than single individuals. “We believed in the power of the collective. We loved to experiment together.” The communication, he says, reflected their aspiration for boundless creativity.
It wasn’t enough to be ‘only’ a Murano glassware company. They wanted to bridge “arts, creativity, environmental and social projects.” Everything revolved around the production of the glasses, the core business —“the sun of our solar system,” which included “many different fragments and facets representing Venice in a more authentic way.”
“I would describe our work as a collage of our dreams and ideas”—and approach deeply rooted in Marie’s legacy, only “a bit revisited.” Our founder used to stay in touch with her clients and friends via the annual postcards she created by collaging together pictures of her sons, her dachshund Gipsy, her glasses, and herself. “I think that, perhaps not completely consciously, we reinterpreted her format and repurposed it in a new media, with a new frequency. But the connection to her work has been there all the time. We tried to stay true to what she had done, but do it our own way.”
One animated GIF from December 2019 features the “XMAS” greetings and a portrait of the team at the time: Mariana, our logistics manager; Alvise, our production manager; Marcantonio; Sugat, the custodian; Alice De Santillana, who back then coordinated our residency program Autonoma; and Francesco Pannoli, our boat’s pilot. Squatting on the left, Tommaso Cazzaro poses with a fake knife and a grin. In the background, more spiky crystals—this time it’s cotissi glass rocks—and mountains covered in snow. Glitters sparkle all over. Looking back at it nine years later, it looks more like a meme than an example of corporate greetings. It’s surreal, sweet, and crazy at the same time. And the good news is, the GIFs will return!