Hello,my name is Felipe Tofani and I’m a brazilian art director and product designer living in Berlin.

I started working as a designer back in Brazil, more than 10 years ago. Everything started with printed advertising in local newspapers as well as a lot of printed material. From there, I learned how to use Flash and my life changed completely.

A couple of years later, I moved to São Paulo where I went to explore online advertising and a lot of web design for brands like Santander, Nextel, Master Card, Puma, GM and FOX Films. When I moved to Berlin, in 2012, my focus changed to product design and this is what i have been doing nowadays.

For the last 4 years I have been pretty busy helping companies and brands create online products in Germany, Brazil and Chile. Axel Springer, AndroidPit, Olympus, Eisbären Berlin, Telekom and National Geographic are a few of the brands I have worked in different projects.

Below you can see some of my most recent work.

Celepedia is a personal online magazine for young females in Germany. Its aim is to entertain them with content that is relatable, reassuring and refreshing through being honest and bold.
When I joined AndroidPit in early 2016, one of the main goals I had was to update the way that the website looked like. There were too many font sizes that didn't correlate well with each other, there were different web patterns all around and the images shown didn't give the right impression.
In march 2013, i was hired by St. Elmo’s Berlin to come up with a design concept for a new Olympus camera. The focus of this pitch was on creative people that need an small camera that is better than their cellphone and smaller than a full DSLR. This was the market Olympus OMD was going for and i had to find a way to target them.
Wie viel 80er stecken in dir? from National Geographic Television Deutschland During my time working as a freelancer art director at St. Elmo's in Berlin, I was in charge of coming up with the visuals for a game called Wie viel 80er stecken in dir? - something that could be translated as How much of the 80s you have inside you?

My Design Process

After working with product design for a couple of years, I realized how important it is to have a plan and know how to execute it. When it comes to building and improving products, you have to understand how they work and go beyond it.

You have to understand who will use it and create an easy and intuitive experience for them. I like to keep things simple and focus on what we’re building. But remember that it takes a while to build something great. It takes a lot of day to day work to come up with a great product. This is why I like to follow the steps below to in every project I design.

1

Before I start any project, I like to research everything about it. I need to understand what problem are we trying to fix, who uses the product and how can we improve their experience when they use it. But we cannot forget business goals and possible competitors.

2

After you understand the problem we’re going to fix, it’s time to brainstorm what is the best way to do it. This is when we start sketching early wireframes and testing out online behaviors.

3

After a solution is defined, it’s time to document and register our goals, what are we trying to fix, setup deadlines and define how we’re going to deliver it. It’s essential to discuss this step with clients and team members so there is no confusion or wrong expectation about what we are building.

4

Before any visual design is done, I like to lay out some information architecture and, together, start mapping out the user experience. After this step is clear, we can perform some user tests and refine our solutions and improve the concept further. Whenever this is done, the user interface will start being designed. First as a overall design and then with a strong focus on details like typography and motion design.

5

Test and iterate once. Test and iterate again so we can dismiss assumptions and make decisions based on user data and not personal taste. Great product design depends on a foundation of understanding users and this is what we need to do.

6

We should never forget to create style guides that define how the user interface needs to look like in different devices and resolutions. A strong visual and experience documentation is a huge asset to products since it keeps it easy to understand and we avoid future mistakes.
I like to live by the words Massimo Vignelli who said that "If you can design one thing, then you can design everything.” I say specialization is for insects. This is one of the many reasons why I like to keep learning new things. It can be calligraphy, motion design, street art, photography or even glitch art. You just have to keep learning and improving your work and yourself. This is what I believe.
I like to keep myself busy and, since I moved to Berlin, I come up with a creative exercise where I design a poster for every concert I go to. Because of that, I have designed posters for bands like Mastodon, Ministry, Dillinger Escape Plan, Deftones, Insect Ark, Neurosis, Baroness, Omega Massif, Sepultura and Shining. And there is more to come.
Besides my work as a designer, I also like to write about design and keep track of what is happening on the design world. For this, I have been keeping a blog called Pristina.org. There I post daily, since 2005. Also, I write about traveling and about Berlin on another blog called Fotostrasse.com.
What else can I say about me? I like weird music, I drink too much coffee, I live with three cats in Neukölln and I have been playing drums since 1998. I don’t have plans to shave soon and I think I need more tattoos. I think that is it.