Diego Marini
“Everything that has to do with rejection in our industry is something that you can turn into a positive.”
Born the son of a typographer in Verona, Italy, design has always been a part of YummyColours co-founder Diego Marini’s life. He began his career designing branding for Italian sportswear labels before moving to Paris working for Greenpeace France, Capgemini, and eventually co-founding UP! creative studio. Diego relocated to New York in 2010, working with several major brands such as Diane von Furstenberg, Nike, and Pantone, winning a Clio Award for a book on DVF. He is currently a guest teacher at Harbour Space in Barcelona with one class on Brand Experiences.
We’ve heard you love anything on two wheels. What is one of your favorite vehicles to drive?
My heart is still with the Vespa. You know, like the 125PX, because they have gears. It's amazing from a design perspective, very driveable, and perfect for enjoying a city. I had one in Paris, and when I was growing up too.
I would love to have a Christiania bike, you see them all over in Copenhagen. They have the cargo in front for groceries and stuff. They're very expensive actually, and they're even more expensive now that they’ve started doing electric ones, but it's really a nice way to cover short distances and carry a lot of things.
What advice do you give designers who are just starting out?
I think our industry is all about feedback and, for lack of a better word, failing. Failing to make it better, right? Not failing for the sake of failing, but iterating. You have to keep refining ideas to make it better.
Failure is not inherently bad. Actually, for us, it's good. Everything that has to do with rejection in our industry is something that you can turn into a positive. You can turn into a challenge and a new iteration that can become something really good and powerful.
Because you're young, you are cocky, and you always think that you do the best things in the world. Having somebody that tells you no, this is not right … it's not a personal attack. That takes some getting used to. Stripping away the personal feelings and trying to grow within the iterations, that’s the goal.
“There's a beauty in New York City I discovered and I haven't seen anywhere else in the world. A generosity and actual collaboration within the industry at large, but also with your competitors.”
You've worked as a designer for many years. What genuinely surprised you when you co-founded YummyColours?
I think the generosity of my competitors. There's a beauty in New York City I discovered and I haven't seen anywhere else in the world. A generosity and actual collaboration within the industry at large, but also with your competitors.
I had competitors referring clients to us. I had people helping us with contracts and legal matters with clients. Helping us with technical problems, lending us their CTO to chat technically with our clients. The positive surprise was we were not alone, and we could lean on the people who might have taken our clients. I still love and miss New York for that particular reason.
What's one of your favorite venues to see live music?
Verona, where I'm from, has an arena built by the Romans in 30 AD. Imagine a smaller coliseum but in better condition, and they use it in the summer for the Arena Opera Festival and regular concerts too.
The acoustics are so good you don't need amplification. Some performers sing in their own voice with no mic, nothing, and you can hear perfectly from anywhere in that arena. I saw Bjork performing there without a microphone, and in the open air, a voice resonates differently. The sound reverberates everywhere. It is amazing.
What's a design trend that you think more people should be paying attention to?
Generative AI is obviously something that we all should pay attention to. How to use it smartly, and how to monitor outcomes that are potentially reinforcing biases. I honestly don't know how it will affect things yet. I think it could be a valuable tool to visualize ideas that require a lot of production like photo shoots and video content. I believe it could be useful for mock-ups, renderings, and proposals, rather than for final results.
Also, in the branding world, we’re seeing a welcome resurgence of custom fonts for brands. I think custom fonts are really beautiful and unique. It brings us back to the beginning of typography, in my opinion. And because it's now more affordable and technically more available, I think typography should try to be more custom, rather than relying on the regular fonts we’ve seen for a while.
We want to add three (recent) beautiful books to our library, what should they be?
There are so, so many. The first one I’d recommend is Heated Words, and it's about the typography going on in New York around the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were these black letters, like patches that you could iron on t-shirts, that showed up everywhere, and it's really beautiful. It was really cheap and easy for people to customize their clothes. It quickly became associated with hip-hop and graffiti, and it's very, very accurate the way the authors present the graphic style in the book.
Number two is Letters from M/M (Paris). I love this graphic design duo from Paris, Michaël Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, and this is a celebration of ninety of their typefaces. Again, there’s another Bjork reference as the writer of the book’s foreword. They’ve had a creative partnership together for years. I have a special edition of this book that is really beautiful.
And the third one is thanks to Denize’s (YummyColours co-founder Denize Maaløe) grandmother. She passed recently at 103 and was one of the first child therapists in Denmark. Her book and magazine collection was amazing. I found on the shelves this magazine from 1930s Paris called Verve.
She has the first four volumes, so you have artists like Man Ray and writers like Hemingway contributing. The way that it was printed was incredibly beautiful because every four pages had a different printing technique like woodblock, linotherapy, screen printing, and so on. To achieve that level of quality they used all the available techniques at the time. It’s very special.
