Thumbnail Credits: The Type Directors Club

Matteo Bologna is the founding partner and creative director of Mucca Design. His multidisciplinary background in architecture, graphic design, illustration, and typography facilitated his early business successes and inspired his decision to create a New York branding and design agency. Under his lead, Mucca has solved numerous design challenges and created uniquely successful work for global companies like Sephora, Shinsegae, Whole Foods, Victoria’s Secret, Barnes & Noble, Rizzoli, Adobe Systems, and Target.

Matteo is also president emeritus of the Type Directors Club and former board member of AIGA/NY. He frequently lectures about branding and typography around the world.

Time Stamps with brief summaries

0:44 Matteo introduces his background, from growing up in the “product design capital” in Milan with a design-aware family to getting hired right out of high school as a magazine illustrator. This led him into graphic design. 

03:26 Matteo discusses what graphic design looked like for magazines back then in Italy. Editors would define the typeface and type style into CRT screens with green text and black backgrounds. Then, they would press a button and big machines would pull up photos with text that was printed on photographic paper. This would then be xeroxed and put into the magazine layout. All of this happened in the late 80s and early 90s where computers were emerging in other parts of the world.

05:33 After being exposed to the possibilities of graphic design, Matteo took the matter into his own hands in order to learn more about it. He got his first computer for design, one that was with only 2 GB of RAM, but he thought it was an amazing machine at the time. He could print different shapes and types using his computer, and that made him a graphic designer, although he never formally studied graphic design. He then explains learning how to make illustrations on his computer that weren’t the best in terms of quality, but because it was made with a computer, it appeared in the magazine as “Computer illustration by….” 

08:33 At a certain point, his illustrator career was overtaken by his graphic designer career. He became more interested in typography and graphic design in general. There was no Internet at the time, so all of his inspiration came from graphic design magazines from abroad. So, he started buying books, and the annually published Type Directors Club was his favorite. He learned by copying designs from those books. 

10:01 Matteo describes his experiences working for a year in a packaging design company, where he learned to work with bigger clients and colleagues. He then opened his own studio with two partners, and they got a new office and factory when they all were in their mid 20s. Matteo shares how the team atmosphere didn’t work out well, so then the company was closed. 

11:33 Matteo explains that he decided to move to the U.S., because a lot of graphic design was happening there, and he wanted to learn from a place where all the “cool stuff” starts. He started off at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, working there for four years. He did a lot of freelance work during this time, which helped him create a client base and financial ability to start his own design company. On October 31, 1999, Matteo moved on and officially opened Mucca Design. 

12:50 After sharing his own experiences in design, Matteo also offers what he thinks about the design industry as a whole. It changed drastically since he first began, changing from analog to digital. While knowledge was mostly based on books at the beginning, after the Internet, that led to an explosion of knowledge across industries that benefited graphic design. He’s impressed nowadays by the level of design that young designers (students) present to him, because their amazing digital portfolios have been influenced by their exposure to quality. There were different levels of quality when Matteo was first starting out, but in the current day, now quality is pretty decent across the board.

15:09 Lastly, Matteo gives advice to the future generation of designers (suggestions that are based on a world that is pre-COVID19). He says that if you can afford it, you shouldn’t think about money for their first job. It’s more important to work with people that inspire you--if you also get paid a lot of money, that’s even better. However, if not, just take the job if there’s an opportunity to learn about design and also learn who you don’t want to work for in the future. He also advises students to not do a job for free, because you’ll never be considered worthy of your time. Even if you get paid less than professionals, you can still work for a professional yourself. Say yes to all opportunities. 

16:54 He shares how he felt depressed and scared at the beginning of the pandemic, but then began talking with his team and together, they felt reinvigorated. He says that this is a good moment to think about yourself and what you want to do next.