I work where the graphic sign meets the linguistic element. Mostly that means text — layout above all.

Hex Archive is the name of an audio-production studio — but it is also a work the two partners, Enrico Scatto and Riccardo Salin, chose to make on themselves and on their own path as designers.

We rejected the simple reportage where audio is linked back to its source in the classic way, in favour of giving the work its own value and a cut that could produce new points of view. The project became experimental by necessity: how do you build an audio website with no images available?

The real constraint. No photography, no screenshots — sound has no native image. So the site had to generate its imagery from language and behaviour rather than borrow it from a camera.

We chose a personal path drawing on alchemy, the occult and magical realism — the duo's own interests. Taking shape, Hex Archive became a place of indirect interaction: the user sees a sequence of possible intertwinings, which he can use to experiment and understand. The logbooks; the deconstructions of musical pieces. Their temple is a shared mental space where much of what was thought is left available to the listener.

but how do you serve the eye that wants a live stimulus?

The project is organic by nature. It works from the macro of the boards — which grow over time — through which the viewer passes; jumping to the meso of the image connected to the selected project; and finally to the micro of the behaviour of the sounds, made visible through small animations.

Macro — the boards. The first surface. A field of intertwinings the viewer moves across, never a menu. It is meant to be enriched indefinitely, so the site is never “finished.” Meso — the image. Selecting a thread drops you to the single project and the formal, sentimental image attached to it. Micro — the sound. At the deepest level the sound's own behaviour is animated — the music made briefly visible.

The true result is not a description but the attempt to stimulate an unconscious mental image of the expressive background within which the two placed their crystal. Where a text proceeds by descriptions, here it proceeds by suggestions. The formal and emotional representation takes on the task of creating the visual content.

Two objects carry what the screen refused — the studio's physical card (paper, blind monogram verso, qr insert) and the crystal it took as its sign.

The stocks. Front — GF Smith Colorplan White/Frost, 175 g/m². Back — Favini Twist Silver, 120 g/m². Insert, between the two — Stratosfera Sfera Velvet, 310 g/m².

the site is live — hexarchive.com ↗

A rebranding proposal for a multinational in wellness and fitness — percussion guns, heated patches, smart cupping — after a rise in competition.

They handed over nine keywords they thought pivotal — confident, clean, minimal, modern, sophisticated, strong, expensive, premium, powerful — and asked, directly, for a full brandbook.

I reinterpreted the brief: many of those words were fighting each other for the same space, or simply weren't synthesizable together.

On the keyword list. Nine adjectives is not a brief, it's a negotiation between contradictions. The work was deciding which ones to let win.

I tested glyphs toward a clean, niche approach and found Prismaset the most suitable base; from there I modified toward the ideal mixture — reworking the ‘c’, drawing an alternative ‘y’ from scratch — and cut the final logotype. I wanted a short logotype rather than a pictogram — one that uses the character's peculiarity to adapt to any situation, down to an Instagram icon. For text I chose Trois Mille: power and coolness, without erasing the work on the logotype.

The palette answers the brief sideways — cool and fiery, but without red: an electric blue as the hottest note, a near-fluorescent green, bone white, and three complementary accents. It only reads once it is applied — so here it is, carried by the solid mark.

A brand identity imagined as a fictional primum movens — something para-real, built under Bauer's instruction to form a solid imagery that could then be shaped.

I split one reality into a submultiple: perForma, the institutional entity, and meta, the first festival of performative arts it organizes. perForma is clean, concise, aseptic, enabling — its ‘o’ construction built to stand apart from the parties it convenes. meta is the mutable one — a festival that reshapes itself for every edition. The typography stages the relation: Sowersby's untitled sans against a two-style family from Nostra — a double that works against itself.

A dichotomy that merges. Two styles, opposite yet complementary — like the artists' spaces that must overlap, forcing a performance to understand it is never alone.
Permeability, not cooperation.

The poster works at a scale that wants a full reveal, so it opens on its own; the rest of the system lives closer to hand.

A magazine that operates amidst a retreating stigma — and gives more advanced tools for orienting oneself in a field that still lacks its tempo-cultural scaffolding.

It is a non-critic magazine, unhooked from a competition busy producing reviews and judgments that add little. It is concerned with which products are useful — as references, or simply as entertainment, which here is never simple. From videogames, with a possible expansion into animation and manga, it offers a historicized, authoritarian point of view: a reference device to rely on. Rigid in its position, by design.

Authoritarian, on purpose. Not neutrality — orientation. A reading code you can disagree with but always locate yourself against.

Printed B5, Japanese Shiroku ban; Mohawk Superfine Eggshell with an ornamental Yawaragami Rayon sheet; simple paperback binding — every page placed on a fixed editorial scheme.

Titles set in cc condensed — the next entry, I think.

A typeface designed to function as control character's head — the hardest, most stubborn operational choice of the project.

I gave an important task to a mostly simple font, when lettering would have been the easier route. The intent was to design a character that could teach me as much as possible, technically, by accepting the challenge of finding it a place despite the use involved. Indecision and inadequacy in the light weight pushed me toward more weight: a black, then regular and demibold; the demibold was chosen. The spacing was cut tight — see the glyph metrics.

Against the trend. Gaming magazines usually go wide. I went condensed — and I'll leave the reason unstated, since saying it would only be repeating it.

Brand identity and art direction for a director of photography — aimed at Instagram and at a website fit for new needs.

Researching a personal, diversifying feed format, I came across the obi strip — the Japanese band wrapped around a product to embellish it and create latent demand in the collector. I sensed the oriental flavour would suit Filippo, and applied it across post formats divided by category. A new influx of users followed. After a moodboard, a palette, an editorial plan, and not-a-few attempts at the logo, the site was built and is now online — opening on a glitched title before landing on the work.

The obi. Sometimes integral to a record's or book's design; here, a system of bands that differentiates posts and quietly signals there is more to collect.