Design is not art.
It is the discipline that solves problems. What you see, the colour, the typeface, the motion, is only the last step.
Which is why a beautiful solution that does not solve the problem falls. Art is personal research, design is service to someone else's problem.
- Sketch, references, moodboard.
- I let it settle.
- I build what I saw.
- I iterate.
The second step is mine alone. That is where the problem separates from the first idea that came to me.
This site is the proof, it started as a game. A Tinder style swipe through my best projects. Letting it settle, I understood that the wow of a single page does not hold up a whole portfolio, so I grew the site a home page that is plainer and does its job.
Design is knowing how to marry beauty with function. PAOLO.DESIGN is minimal like Braun and like Apple, with a punch of colour where it is needed.
The wow concentrates, it is never diluted.
The base stays minimal precisely so the one pop moment lands, what I call bold minimalism. The 3D room and the match page are the wow. Everything else on the site shouts nothing, by design. My philosophy is that to come out of the background noise of communication you have to fit into the system with something minimal and also land one visual or verbal slap of real impact, so you are remembered.
Dieter Rams
The Braun ET66 calculator, with Dietrich Lubs, 1987. The same one behind the iOS Calculator. Less, but better.
Jony Ive
The emblem for the coronation of Charles III, with LoveFrom: the flora of four nations becoming a crown. It is not an Apple product, and that is the point.
Olafur Eliasson
Room for one colour: a room where a single yellow light takes every other colour away from you. One decision, taken to the end.
Felipe Pantone
Subtractive Variability: coloured glass discs that rotate and never repeat the same combination. Colour treated as material.
Outside design: Teenage Engineering, Dyson, Nothing, the legibility of Overwatch and brat by Charli XCX, where an acid green and one lowercase word became the most recognisable identity of its year.