These books document the work and the culture of sumUX, my team at Google. The first edition we made was called V.1, a diary of sumUX Visual Design team process. This book celebrates visual designers’ point of view when developing our visual language, and how that is reflected in product. The aim of the project is to showcase, inspire, and create dialogue between projects, reading each piece of work in the light of the others.

V.1 was printed by a small family-run press in Italy on Fedrigoni paper (Arcoprint + Old Mill). Screen print, blind emboss, and foiling provide different tactility feelings across its sections. The book collects most of the work of the team, emphasising its design craft as a means to exemplify the importance of expressiveness, emotion, and essence.

The following edition of these books was called “Twenty”. 2018 marked Google’s twentieth anniversary, and with that the anniversary of Search ― sumUX’s product area. While it could never be comprehensive, this book collects history, output, and culture of the team.

People are the core of sumUX. We consist of artists, designers, engineers, program managers, researchers, and writers. This book is a record of their collective efforts. This has been a nimble, grassroots effort. It was championed by a handful of contributors on our team but represents a much larger cast across our team.

Our mission with Google Go was to make the internet accessible to everyone, at any income or literacy level: it’s based on a tap-first interaction model providing an easier way to navigate content, it allows users with limited literacy or reading impairments to listen to webpages, and runs smoothly on low-end devices.

Google Go brings access to information to users in Emerging Markets accessing the internet for the first time on mobile devices. It’s lightweight, multilingual, data-saving, and blazing fast. The app helps discover new content on the internet. Users can quickly access favorite apps and websites, as well as images, videos and information on the things they care about. The team invested heavily on research to validate usability concepts, iterate rapidly, and to create a product culturally resonant in different local cultures. The app has been designed to run smoothly on low-end phones and to occupy as little storage and memory as possible. 

Google Assistant is your personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that helps you getting things done. I worked on the project at its conception and initial launch on the first Pixel phone, collaborating with a team of incredibly talented designers across different locations.

This is a collection of products and projects I’ve been working on recently as visual/UX designer. They are randomly sorted.
Here below a poster created for our Poster Project representing “Chaos”. The design reacts to ambient sound, so if the room is particularly noisy the poster becomes increasingly complex.

Working in large teams is not easy. Equanimity & Eudaemonia (below) is a simple initiative to encourage empathy and inclusion. We asked advice and recommendations from colleagues around the world on how to overcome work-related struggles and finding the right balance. We printed them in a card deck: when in struggle, pick a card.

Each card works independently but can be paired with others to reveal a different graphic composition (metaphor of a team cooperating effectively together, better than the sum of its assets).

Posters created for Poster Project, a space for visual experimentation and expressive freedom that to bring together designers from different teams in our company.

Identity designed for the annual Android Google App Summit, an event where the Search community gathers together for three days of talks, conferences, and social events. Awesome animation by Laura Dimitru. Photos: T.Kelley, G.Ritchie, B.Abatti (Unsplash).

A research project that focuses on social implications of self driving vehicles. The book embodies: desk research, cockpit UI design aimed to build trust between the human and the system, and speculative analysis of future scenarios (note: this project is from 2013, some assumptions and hypothesis made at the time might not be relevant anymore).

The ultimate goal of the project is to increase user confidence, improve acceptance, and promote benefits that self driving cars will bring to social mobility. 

The first section of the project investigates how mobility evolved in recent years, the social impact of cars over the decades, and (positive and negative) impact on society and personal mobility.

The second part introduces the user interface design which makes explicit the objectives of the research: building a “bridge” between the human and the machine to increase confidence and trust in the autonomous system decisions, and allow actors to communicate seamlessly.

A crucial aspect of the design process was to determine visual variables complexity, information hierarchy, and cognitive load during manual driving mode. The interface is based on two fundamental principles: simplicity of use, and anthropomorphism.

“Cleo” is the name of the system. It’s a visual storyboard of what is happening outside the car. It leverages verbal and non verbal communication. The UI has been designed for first models of self-driving cars with manual drive option and standard cockpit layout.

The UI has been tested relying on qualitative research with the support of eye tracking. I developed a quick prototype and asked a small sample of users (7 participants) to complete key tasks in order to get early insights and iterate.

The UI lives on several surfaces in the car (instrument panel, dashboard display, Heads Up Display). Information architecture and density vary based on the active modality: from manual to fully autonomous. User feedback highlighted ambiguity in settings and cartography, and helped simplifying navigation layout and dialog confirmations.

As part of the project, I sketched a mobile app for self driving taxis / autonomous-car-sharing that would help users requesting a car on-demand (transportation as service), envisioning a future where car ownership is an old concept. This project has been published on ADI Design Index 2015. Special thanks to Pier Paolo Porta (VisLab).

Thi is the outcome of a workshop with Accurat at Resonate Festival. The visualisation compares the sovereign debt exposure of sixty-one European banks to the twenty-nine nations of the old continent. Each country is represented by a polygon. In Flatland a higher number of sides is associated with higher intelligence. In this case a higher number of sides means higher public debt.

The inspiration for this infographic comes from the events’ location. I wanted to make a tight connection between the artwork and the environment it was conceived.

The outer circle describes the role of the banks. It’s divided in 4 segments based on the entity of the investment, so is easy to understand in which countries they invested and in what percentage.

A monograph about Enzo Ragazzini, an Italian photographer that pioneered Optical Art in the 60s and beyond. His work focuses on research on visual perception, dark room experimentations, social and anthropological photography. You can check his work at www.enzoragazzini.com.

The monograph contains all graphic and dark room experiments, anthropological photography, industrial photography and visual experimentations.
Enzo's practice is extremely multifaceted, his successful career spanned across multiple fields. For this reason the monograph doesn't follow a chronological order, but it's based on deeper logical connections among projects.

Throughout his career he collaborated with Penguin Books, was invited by Alan Aldridge to contribute to “The Beatles illustrated lyrics”, participated in Venice Biennale, worked for companies like Olivetti, Touring Club Italiano, and has been displayed in many prestigious galleries.
Enzo is a great master. Not only for his fascinating, emphatic, and sophisticated work, but also for the way in which he approaches life in relation to it. As he explains: “I was ill of my own life, photography healed me.”

The book analyses of the urban area of Urbino (Italy) mapping several aspects of social relations. It’s the result of a workshop led by Joost Grootens at ISIA Urbino. The atlas analyses several aspects of the public spaces of the city, and how citizens generally interact with them throughout the day. Its goal is indeed to create a “social map” of the city.
In the mapping phase we highlighted all the public places where people usually interact, as bars, restaurants, universities, churches, museums, tourist spots, public offices.