Independent art director and writer working between Milan, Lisbon and the slow weeks in between — building considered editorial worlds for fashion houses, small publishers, and the occasional restaurant that has not yet learned to shout.
Studios are mostly weather. I keep one in a narrow third-floor room in Milan where the light arrives late and leaves early, and the work I make is shaped, more than I would like to admit, by the hours in between. Slowness is not a brand position; it is what is left after one stops apologising for taking the time a thing needs.
I came to design through bookbinding — a few summers in a workshop in Bologna where the master, ninety-one, would not let anyone touch a press until they had folded a thousand signatures by hand. He believed that an object remembers the patience that was spent on it, and that a reader, even an inattentive one, can feel the difference in the wrist.
The studio now works in three registers: editorial systems for small publishers and arts institutions; identities for the kind of restaurant or atelier where the founder still answers the telephone; and writing, which is the long argument I have with the rest of the work. I take few clients and I keep them for years.
I do not believe that good design is invisible. I believe the opposite — that it should ask, gently, to be noticed, the way a well-set table asks to be sat at. A page is a place. A logotype is a doorway. The work is the hospitality.
Design, when it is honest, is mostly an argument with one's own impatience. I have spent a decade losing it slowly.
It is a city that mistrusts noise, which makes it a kind reader of restrained work. I find that the bookshops near Brera and the men who sell flowers outside the metro are, between them, a full education.
I ask three questions. Do they read. Do they cook. Do they remember the names of the people who clean their studio. If the answers are yes, we usually find a way.
There are two of us, sometimes three when Vera is in town. We turn down more than we accept. I would rather make less and have it be true than make more and apologise for it later.
A book about typography and grief, which is taking longer than I told my editor. It will be done when the sentences are no longer embarrassed of themselves.