TypographyBrandUX/UI

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

Brand identity

Identity for a production house: mark, colour system, photographic direction, printed materials, merchandise and website.

The problem

A production house sells imagination and has to prove it on everything it prints. The mark had to hold up small on a card and at two metres on a poster, and stay recognisable even reduced to a single letter.

What I designed

  • A mark built inside a slanted quadrilateral, like a frame seen at an angle: the shape says “screen” before the name is even read.
  • The M is drawn to live on its own: detached from the logotype it becomes a monogram and goes onto bags, shirts and folders without losing identity.
  • Three high-contrast colour pairs — mint, magenta, white, always against black — and seven declared lock-ups, so the mark works on light, dark and coloured grounds with no improvised decisions.
  • A constant photographic direction: low angle, sky, high saturation. Always the same point of view, that of someone looking up.
  • The Think big payoff carried from the poster to the site, where the home opens on those two words and a single call to action.
  • The system applied to cards, folders, outdoor posters, t-shirts, tote bags, social and website.
Mega Production
The mark and its seven variations: mint and black, magenta and black, white and black. All declared, so nothing gets improvised on the first coloured ground.
Mega Production
The photographic direction: always the low angle, always the sky. It’s the point of view of someone looking up, which is also what the payoff means.
Mega Production
On a poster the system holds its distance: the mark in white stays legible over any sky.
Mega Production
Two-sided business cards: image on one side, solid colour cut by black on the other. Neither looks like the back of the other.
Mega Production
The M blown up until it runs off the format becomes a graphic ground: folders and flyers use the same letter as the logo, not an added pattern.
Mega Production
On merchandise the mark splits in two: the letter alone on the chest, the full logotype on the sleeve or centred.
Mega Production
The M as a monogram filling the bag, reversed between black and green: the sign works even with no name beside it.
Mega Production
In feed the image arrives before the mark, which settles bottom right like a signature.
Mega Production
The site opens with the two words of the payoff and a single call to action: tell us your idea.

A new brand identity for a local blueberry farmer.

The problem

A small local grower ends up on the shelf next to industrial brands with photographic budgets. It couldn’t win on realism: it had to win on recognition, with something you remember after seeing it once.

What I designed

  • The mark comes from botany: the five-pointed star a blueberry carries on its crown becomes the graphic sign running through every application.
  • The tittles on the i replaced by blueberries with leaves. The name carries the product inside it and stays legible down to a few millimetres.
  • Two lock-ups for two uses: stacked for square formats and icons, a horizontal plaque for signs and labels.
  • A character — a walking blueberry — for social, packaging and anything that needs a voice rather than a logo.
  • A palette of night blue, cream and leaf green: the colour of the fruit becomes the ground rather than the subject, so the real product stands out on top of it.
  • Applications down to the detail of the business card, where the brand’s tone ends up deciding the job title printed under the name.
Mirtilia
The stacked logotype and the plaque version. The tittles on the i are blueberries with leaves, and the star behind is the crown the fruit actually has.
Mirtilia
Plaque and horizontal lock-ups: two shapes for two uses, sign and label, with nothing redrawn.
Mirtilia
App icon in positive and negative. At minimum size the name, the star and nothing else survive.
Mirtilia
The character: a walking blueberry. It works where a logo isn’t enough — social, packaging, anything that needs a voice.
Mirtilia
Character and mark coexist without overlapping: one introduces, the other identifies.
Mirtilia
On the business card the printed job title reads “Boss Mirtillo”: the brand’s tone decides even what goes under the name.

Brand identity, packaging, social communication and accessories for a coffee shop.

The problem

A coffee shop has a few seconds and a few centimetres to be recognised: the sign glimpsed in passing, the bag on the counter, the post going by. It needed a sign that stayed itself from a two-centimetre roundel on a sachet to the face of a half-kilo pack.

What I designed

  • A single graphic device carries the whole system: the horizon line cutting red from green. It is the sun behind the elephant in the emblem, and it is the same cut that divides bag, tote, sachet and post.
  • A two-tier mark — round emblem and plaque with logotype — because the two extremes of scale ask for two solutions, not an enlargement of the same one.
  • The elephant is drawn as a solid silhouette with no internal detail: it survives small print, embroidery and a phone screen.
  • Heavy condensed type used as a speaking voice: Tastes goooood with the o’s stretched until they fill the line. The typographic joke is also how the text is made to fall exactly into the column.
  • The back of the pack given over to type alone, so the two faces divide the work instead of repeating each other.
  • The system applied to coffee packaging, menus, folders, teapot, sachets, three versions of tote bag and a social editorial plan.
Elephant Café
The coffee bag: the line dividing red from green is the horizon, and the elephant walks along it just as in the emblem.
Elephant Café
The reverse is type alone. Front and back don’t compete: one does the image, the other the information.
Elephant Café
Folders, clipboard menu, teapot and sachets. The round emblem holds the small format, the plaque the large one.
Elephant Café
On raw canvas the mark stands alone: sun, elephant and plaque, with no coloured ground to prop it up.
Elephant Café
The same bag in its spoken version: “Tastes goooood” with the o’s stretched until they fill the width. The joke is also how the line gets justified.
Elephant Café
A third variant, the mark small and centred on the horizon cut: three bags, one system.
Elephant Café
In feed the system holds three different registers — claim, promotion, photograph — without changing its rules.