Davide Melotti — Art Director and Design Consultant

Type design · Art Direction · Design Consultant

I never specialised, and it’s a choice. Interfaces, brands, typefaces and still learning.

Twelve years spent widening the perimeter instead of narrowing it. SaaS platforms and apps used on the road, technical e-commerce, brand identities from the name to the packaging, typefaces both commissioned and commercially released. Every new field makes the ones I already knew more solid: someone who has drawn a typeface understands a design system before seeing one, and someone who has built a brand knows why a purchase path has to be written before it is designed.

This profile is what you want when the problem hasn’t been defined yet: creative direction and consulting, the craft of holding different specialists together and speaking everyone’s language — designers, developers, client. Right now I’m adding information security and red teaming of AI systems, because that is where the risk in digital products is moving.

A project is a system, not an artefact.

I spent years drawing typefaces. It’s work that teaches one thing, repeated thousands of times: every element exists in relation to all the others, and consistency is built up front, in the rules, not afterwards, in the fixes.

Applied to an interface, that means starting from the flow and the states — what happens when the field is empty, when the connection drops, when there is too much data — and arriving at the screen as a consequence. Applied to a brand, it means handing over rules that outlive whoever applies them after me.

The rest is listening: to the client, to the stakeholders, to whoever will actually use the thing. I’ve worked with teams in Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom and India, and the hard part was never the software.

Direction and consulting: Creative direction, coordinating designers, client management, presenting to stakeholders, defining method and process
Product & UX: User flows, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, interaction design, SaaS, mobile apps
UI & Design Systems: Design systems, component libraries, style guides, design tokens, responsive, Material Design, data visualization, handoff
Brand & Typography: Brand identity, brand books, packaging, art direction, type design, typeface development, lettering, editorial, illustration
Tools: Figma, Adobe CC, Glyphs, After Effects, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python
In progress: Information security, red teaming of AI systems

Let’s talk

gustodubbio@gmail.com