Jerry Stiller as Frank Costanza from Seinfeld.
The first in a series of portraits of TV show characters.

Check out these posts too:

1. Digital Painting
2. Brain Slug Illustration
3. Fringe Portraits: Olivia, Peter and Walter

More images and info in my Portfolio Gallery.

Check out these posts too:

1. Digital Painting
2. Painting a Jack-O’-Lantern
3. Painting the Smoke Monster from Lost in Photoshop

The Converter is a unit conversion app designed by Vladimir Kofman. He contacted me to design a new logo for the app’s newest version.

This logo was a lot of work as the design is complicated and full of details. Icons for all iPhone and iPad models were created, resizing, redrawing and optimizing the shapes by hand for each size.

Check out these posts too:

1. Logo and Icons for DailyShopper
2. Gradebook Logo
3. SleepMute Logo and Icons

I was contacted by Erich Douglass to design a logo for his Android app Gradebook. The app is designed to be used by students to keep track of school assignments, course work, and their GPA.
Erich sent me links to similar apps and logos he liked. He suggested I concentrate on graphic metaphors connected to school so I sent him a few sketches. I always try to come up with at least three different concepts for app logos, ranging from the most obvious to the most far out. It’s important to stretch your imagination at this stage. As usual, the simplest concept was the best one (#3):

I created the icon based on the approved sketch:

Obviously it was too busy. We decided to simplify it in order to make it read better so here’s the final version:

All in all this was a fun project. I especially enjoyed the quick turnaround which always makes me itch for more and more work.

Here’s Erich’s testimonial about our collaboration:

Working with Andrea as been fantastic! As someone who is new to working with a freelancer, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Once I had sent him my contact information Andrea responded promptly to my request and helped guide me through the process. After describing the application to him, he quickly sketched up a few icon ideas and we proceeded to refine the concept until we came up with the final icon. The results were great and I belive that a great icon will help set my application apart from the crowd.
If I need any design work done in the future, Andrea will be the first person I contact.

Check out these posts too:

1. Net Worth Logo and Icons
2. Logo and Icons for DailyShopper
3. Mooflower Logo

Personal illustration inspired by inline typefaces. Also a bit nostalgic since I grew up close to Italy’s slot car manufacturer Polistil’s main factory.

UPDATE: High quality art prints are available in the store.

Check out these posts too:

1. New Prints in the Store
2. The Combover: Why Wear It?
3. My Print Store Is Open

Matt Parkins from Mooflower.com contacted me to design the company’s new logo. He already had a concept in mind: a cow with a flower in her mouth. This was going to be fun.
He also provided examples of characters and styles that he liked, basically a mood board. Few clients take the time to do this but it’s such a great help in speeding up the process of finding the right tone for the project.

I started sketching ideas based on Matt’s suggestion. Immediately I had concepts for the typography, too.

I drew the cow in different poses and Matt chose the front-facing one because of its higher flexibility. Another round of sketches to fine-tune the design ensued.

Matt was very precise in his feedback. By combining features from different sketches as is usually the case with character design (let’s call it the Frankenstein method), we finally had our cow! All I had to do was draw and shade the final character in Illustrator.

The typography required a bit of extra work as my initial idea didn’t really work. Ultimately I chose a more understated solution to accompany the highly visible character. Balance and restraint are important, even in a “loud” design like this one.

We were both highly satisfied with the result.
Here’s Matt’s testimonial about our collaboration:

I asked Andrea to create our company logo. While we had some vague ideas of what might work Andrea was able to come up with something that certainly captured our vision and brought so much more to the design which we now have as our company logo. Andrea’s ideas were inspiring, well thought through and excellent in terms of quality. Frankly he is the kind of professional that you want to work with, and he will be my first port of call when I need design work in future.

Check out these posts too:

1. Gradebook Logo
2. The Converter Logo
3. Net Worth Logo and Icons

FNOVI (Federazione Nazionale Ordini Veterinari Italiani), the national federation of the associations of Italian veterinarians, asked me to develop a logo for FNOVI ConServizi, a child organization (a consortium) that will coordinate activities for the Federation.
The original concept was to identify the consortium as a multi-faceted company with many diversified tasks hence the diamond was chosen as graphical metaphor to represent it.

The classic diamond diagram didn’t cut it for me though (sorry about the pun!), so I looked for a way to make it unique and memorable while keeping it instantly recognizable as a diamond. It would also be ideal to incorporate FNOVI, the mother company, inside the logo.
After extended sketching sessions I came up with this concept:

It could either be executed as a wireframe or as a filled shape. The second option was chosen so it was time to develop the typography and the colors. Several typefaces were contemplated and Museo Slab ultimately settled upon.
Did you know that blue is the color of veterinarians? Two shades of blue allow the diamond’s facets to be kept separate from each other and are repeated in the typography. The mother company is rendered in a lighter shade to push it in the background.
The logo also works in grayscale and in monochrome versions, of course, allowing the brand to be expanded in the future.

As always with logos I really enjoyed working on this project. The bonus here was the fact that the client is Italian, something that rarely happens to me.

Check out these posts too:

1. NiftySoft Logo
2. Mooflower Logo
3. AMC Logo

Gary Myers, the owner of myCodeStudio and iOS developer, contacted me to design the logo for his new iPhone and iPad app, DailyShopper.

Here are some of the sketches I created to explore logo concepts:

In the end we opted for the simplest, most direct representation of shopping, the cart.

Here is what Gary said about our collaboration:

Working with Andrea has been a pleasure. As my first introduction to a professionally designed icon, I found the collaborative process and Andrea’s responsiveness to be a great experience. I loved the little touches he added to the icon that really added to the impact. In addition, he provided the icons for both the iPhone and iPad in all the required sizes, creating special versions where needed. I would not hesitate to work with Andrea again.

Check out these posts too:

1. The Converter Logo
2. Net Worth Logo and Icons
3. SleepMute Logo and Icons

I was contacted by Dave Murdock of Tangerine Element to design the logo for a new OS X utility he was developing. SleepMute automatically mutes and unmutes sound when your display or computer sleeps and wakes up.
Dave’s initial idea was for the logo to portray a sleeping speaker. I created a bunch of different sketches to illustrate variations of this concept then I started expanding on the idea of a sleeping computer.

We narrowed down the choice to three possible sketches:

We picked n.2 because it’s simple, clear and it follows Apple’s recommendation that icons for utilities be two-dimensional and front-facing.
A few iterations were necessary to choose the right colors and size. You should always test your OS X icons in the dock to see if they blend well with their neighbors.
Also invaluable was this tip by Panic for creating ICNS files under Snow Leopard.

SleepMute is now available on the App Store.

Check out these posts too:

1. Logo and Icons for DailyShopper
2. Net Worth Logo and Icons
3. Gradebook Logo

What if Massive Dynamic, back in 1983, sold chocolate treats enriched with Cortexiphan to give every kid special abilities? This is the magazine ad they would have used to market this revolutionary product that I named “Dr. Bishop’s Cortexi-Treats”.

Designed as a 40 cm x 60 cm poster, this was incredibly fun to design and create.
Fringe is one of my favorite shows and apparently its ratings are pretty low this season so it’s facing cancellation. To show my support for the show I first created portraits of Olivia/Fauxlivia, Walter/Walternate and Peter and now this fake ad.

According to Fringe’s mythology Cortexiphan was invented by William Bell in 1981 so I imagined these chocolate-covered hazelnut pralines, laced with the drug, would have been ready for production in 1983. I had to create an 80′s style magazine ad so I first took a good look at the alternate titles used for the Fringe episodes that take place when Peter was young:

I took note of the gradients, typefaces and graphic elements used, all typical of the industrial/neon style of the era, and constructed my fake magazine ad, complete with a ridiculously bold slogan and copy.
I also came up with the “Dr. Bishop’s” brand, brought to you by Massive Dynamic:

I really really enjoyed working on this project, first of all because it allowed me to show more support for Fringe, second of all because it involved creating logos, hunting for typefaces, drawing realistic chocolate candy, playing with neon effects and finally adding a patina of noise and dirt to age the advertisement.
I hope this tongue-in-cheek tribute helps Fringe stay on the air for more seasons of intelligent and weird entertainment.

Check out these posts too:

1. Fringe Portraits: Olivia, Peter and Walter
2. Ebook Cover for Smashing Magazine
3. “How to Create Selling E-Commerce Websites” Cover Illustration