I design brand systems and I keep running them after they launch.

NOIL stands for No One is Listening. It is a new media platform that connects people across cultures through voice, and it works in three places: on the page, on the screen, and in the world. The events so far, a Night of Authentic Voice, a run of Power of Listening workshops, and a live reading of the founder’s memoir essay, have drawn 50+ people from 5+ countries.

The primary logo is the full name typed out and then struck through with a single blue line. The name is the problem the platform exists to solve, so crossing it out is the argument. Two stacked NOIL marks handle tight spaces, each drawn in print black and in paper white, and the manual is explicit that the short mark never stands in for the long one unless the space demands it.

Three typefaces carry the whole thing. F25 Executive is held back for the logo and for headings that belong to NOIL, Franklin Gothic Book does the body because it reads as a human voice rather than a house style, and Libre Bodoni takes the quotations. Under that sits one rule about contrast: anything typed can be answered by something drawn. Headings get underlined with a hand stroke, and the lettering runs across the covers and the article layouts.

The palette is paper white, print black and a sky blue, with blush pink and golden yellow behind them, chosen to read as curiosity and openness rather than authority. NOIL wanted bright colour as resistance to what I call the greige takeover of design. I wrote and designed the whole manual, and since NOIL has no designer in house it had to settle questions I would not be there for. Arianna Bambagioni worked with me on some of the design components.

Relax Firenze is a wellness centre in the middle of Florence with a skincare line under the same name. It sold in person, by word of mouth, mostly to women over 35. Five product lines were told apart by small symbols on identical glass bottles, so from across a shop the whole range looked like one product. The brief was to rebrand it, widen the age range, reach men, and put sustainability ahead of everything else.

The five lines already existed, under names that did not say what any of them were for: Pura, Donnaluna, Orobianco, Corpo d’Amore and Lui. I named the brand Lumina, from the Latin for light: lume in Italian, luminosa in Spanish, luminous in English, and in Arabic, of the glowing light of the moon. Then I renamed the lines after things in the sky, Celeste, Luna, Sol, Stelle and Eclipse, and each one keeps what it was originally for. Every one of them either gives light or is lit by it, so the range finally has one idea holding it together.

The mark is that word inside a circle, and the horizontal bar of the L is a golden light that cuts across and completes the word. I drew the circle uneven so it reads as water and movement instead of as a perfect ring. Type is Josefin Sans in three weights with Cherolina on the logo, and neither face is perfectly symmetrical, which is the same decision as the circle.

Each line got a colour and an age. Celeste is the palest blue and sells to women 18 to 30, Sol is for men over 25, and Eclipse is a deep oxblood for anyone over 35, which is where the brief to widen the range and reach men actually gets answered. The colours come out of the wellness centre’s own vocabulary rather than out of cosmetics, so blue is there because the body is mostly water, green for the earth, oxblood for maturity, gold for the elixir of life. Running through every label is one stroke of white gold, #eede76, and it is the only thing all five share, which is what makes the shelf read as one house.

Sustainability had to be visible rather than claimed. The boxes are 100% plantable paper printed on the inside as well as the outside, so the panel carrying the ingredient copy can go in the ground once the bottle is open. The two faces do different jobs: the outside argues the case for buying sustainable skincare at all, and the inside is ingredients and hand-drawn botanicals. Bottles and jars are Estal’s Magister line in 100% recycled glass, and customers bring the empties back to the centre to be refilled. Bottles get a wooden dropper, jars get a white cap, and the cotton bag carries the logo small on the side so people will use it for other things.

Guerillas was my BA design research thesis at the Florence Institute of Design International. The question was whether deconstructivist design can teach critical analysis, and the only honest way to answer it was to build the thing, so I made a printed history textbook for teenagers and an app that reads it.

What I was arguing against is The American Pageant, one of the most used US history textbooks there is. Long hyphenated paragraphs, tidy graphs, and authors students are never asked to name. Swiss principles, simplicity and a neutral voice and a strict grid, get read as objectivity, which is the last thing a history book should be claiming. The student hands control to the text instead of arguing with it.

So the book argues back. Body text is Candara at 14 and 20 point, and the size shifts to mark what matters and to leave a reader checkpoints to stop at. Display type is a set of punk faces: Carton, Stampede, Heavitas, gutter vomit, and a copperplate called US Declaration. Chapter openers are collage. On the Wyoming suffrage spread the word WHY? is set over and over in a smudged typewriter face, and the repetitions are arranged into question marks that run down the gutter. Every article is signed, down to the university or publication the writer came from, so a student can go and doubt them. That is the skill the book exists to teach.

The app carries the same system onto a screen, across four tabs: home, library, scan and community. There is an audio option so the text can be listened to instead of read. Scan opens the AR layer, built in partnership with Artivive, so a page in the printed book animates when a phone is held over it. I specified all of it for build, with type sizes, weights, hex values and image dimensions on every screen.

GRRRL RUIN is the music I write and play, and I design it as well. The wordmark is cut from magazine letters. I moved them around by hand until the line sat right, so the tilt and drop of every letter is where I physically put it.

The poster is a recruitment ad, because I needed three or four musicians. I wrote it in the register the ad belongs to instead of the one a design portfolio reaches for, and built the page as a collage of newspaper clippings, old personal ads and a punk documentary sheet. The wordmark breaks in half and pins the two opposite corners.

Designing for music is the work I would most like to be paid for.

Videography was my favourite class at university, and these are the three short films I made for it in Florence. I wrote each one, directed it, shot it and edited it.

Lovesick is the longest at 12:42, and the most abstract of the three. It was shot in one room, and I handwrote every letter that appears in it. The whole thing cost under thirty euro. The actress carries the film. I edited the music as well.

Per Sempre runs 8:56. I wrote the script in English and then translated it into Italian, because the performance was more honest in the language it was being acted in. The actors took the translated script and made it sound like their own words. The English runs underneath in yellow, which is the old cinema convention, and it has to stay readable on a dark frame without taking over the shot.

Pose is a conceptual film about self-voyeurism, and at 4:08 it is the shortest of the three. I composed the music for this one.

I have shot in every mode I could get to, and the one I keep coming back to is directed and conceptual work. I light it and style it first, then I work with the person in front of the camera until the picture is actually there.

Street asks the opposite of me. I have to be ready and then not hesitate, because the man with the pipe and the woman outside the market each lasted about two seconds. I like shooting concerts too. The light there belongs to somebody else and it changes on every song, so most of that work happens in what I keep afterwards.

Languages is a photo series about the human body as a reflection of nature. I built it as a book rather than a set of prints, because the argument is in the pairing. A mouth is followed by a seed pod that has the same seam, and hair by grass that falls the same way.

Handwritten pages run between the photographs. The sequencing tells the story as much as the pictures do, so the order of the pages took longer to settle than any single frame took to shoot.