Ciao,
This is Joe Miceli, full name pronounced only when mother meant business. Thankfully, she rarely did.

I work with letters, and rhythm, a new foundry born from the union of Archivio Tipografico & il Letterista. Before that, the AlfaType foundry was established.
Literally. (very funny)
In one form or another. My job is to keep words from disappearing. Some letters behave. Others, not so much. All letters are conformists, yet they always rebel. That is simply not true. Don’t believe a word I’m saying.
I studied graphic design and type design at the Rietveld Academie. (This means I have opinions about spacing. Back off.) I had previously established a graphic design practice called Alfa60. A nod to Godard’s Alphaville—a film where language is policed and meaning is mechanized. Typography, too, can be reduced to cold function. I’ve always resisted that.
At a certain point, designing my own type felt inevitable. Letterforms were no longer just tools; They became the work itself.
The AlfaType Fonts foundry took shape years ago. Initially as an offshoot of Alfa60, as just a repository for my typographic experiments, only later on metastasising into a full-fledged foundry. When I released my first fonts into the world, I hoped they wouldn’t come home broke. But a letter is just a shape, a shape is a thought, a thought is a mistake waiting to happen.

Designing type is to plan an economy of space. A typeface begins in the studio, but it lives and dies out in the world. Some get used for big-budget rebrands, others get quietly installed and forgotten, living out their days in an unpaid intern’s font menu. Some ended up on wine labels, others on a national broadcast, another on the facade of a museum. You never know where a typeface will end up—if it will be loved, pirated (actually I was flattered when that happened), or left behind. But that’s the risk of making something meant to be used: once you let it go, it writes its own future.
Typography starts with writing. Writing with a tool. I spent years nudging Bézier curves, but something was missing.
One day, I found a photo of Aldo Novarese at his desk, a huge hand-drawn letter in front of him. That’s when it clicked: Letters aren’t just drafted—they were built of strokes and gestures. I insist on an economy of gestures in an economy that aims to eliminate human gestures.
I started researching typographic drafting techniques. What I found led me beyond type design, beyond calligraphy—to something practical, physical, applied. Sign painting. It was typography, but with bristles instead of vectors, with strokes instead of math.
Scouring facsimiles of old correspondence courses, tussling with long-bristled brushes, painting flat black on paper, chasing a shape that came from the hand, not the screen. By 2014, I had designed my first brush-painted typeface: Tratto. A weight was a brush size, each stroke was a movement. At some point, simply studying letters wasn’t enough—I wanted to put them to work. What started as a formal research project became a craft.
Nowadays, I paint signs. Mostly. years ago I teamed up with my compare Rocco Barbaro under the name il Letterista. I met Rocco while I was deep in the depths of my nascent sign-painting obsession. He must have had more serious ambitions which I promptly corrupted. Together, weekends became practice sessions. Practice sessions became a habit. A habit became a craft.
Torino is full of old signs. Torino is also full of new signs. You are now approximately Km. from Torino. The problem is, you only notice the old ones. A sign points the way, but it can also stop you in your tracks. We studied the city’s fading letters like archaeologists at a dig site. Our findings? A craft buried under stickers and vinyl cutters. New signs are made to be scrolled past. Now, the city itself is a sign, advertising nothing but itself.
If the old sign painters were gone, we would have to teach ourselves. A few generous hands pointed the way. The rest was trial, error, and plenty of turpentine. It’s been years of painting on glass, storefronts, and signs of every kind. Our work is scattered across Italy, hiding in plain sight.
Il Letterista is not a studio— or a company, or even a workshop—it is a small conspiracy against the generic, the thoughtless, the disposable. A plot hatched in paint, aided by bristled accomplices, draped in gold. A bad sign peels like a sunburn and fades like a regret. Hand-painted letters are like people: each one slightly different, slightly flawed, slightly stubborn. This is also why they need their space. Some letters were born to be gilded, others were born to be stencilled on crates.
I started carving letters in stone years ago as a side-hustle. (for now). My friends tease that I’m ‘regressing’, I prefer to tell myself I’m seizing the means of inscription.
As usual, I started out teaching myself to carve. Until last year: a week in the Welsh hills, carving whenever the weather allowed, I spent a brief but intense period with John Neilson. John is connected to Tom Perkins, who studied under Richard Kindersley, who learned it from his father David, who learned it, at a bench in High Wycombe in 1934, from Eric Gill. I cut a piece there for Lina: Legati in amicizia. Bound in friendship. Or envoys of it. Italian lets you mean both, and stone doesn’t ask which. It was stolen with my bag on the bus back from the airport. Those letters lasted five days. Tracing the origins of the forms I’ve spent my life designing, painting, printing, and playing.
Everyone studies ancient inscriptions as relics. Few study them as instructions. For years, I viewed monumental inscriptions with a detached admiration. Classical. Imperial. Beautiful. Unapproachable. Then, as a sign painter, I saw them differently. The brush, the chisel —the same motion, the same rhythm, different permanence.
I was born in Siracusa in 1980, to an artist father and a historian mother.One spoke of the world in images, the other in words.
My grandfather changed his name when he emigrated to the States. I never met him, but I got his name. Which means I’m a reboot of sorts.
In 1984, we moved to New York City. The city was an education: graffiti on subways, zines scavenged from friends, all the bold letters fighting for space. I was hit by the raw energy of the city and the immediacy of all the images.
At City As School, I wanted to be a cameraman, shooting 16mm film, taking light readings, and framing my first films. But somewhere between the darkroom and the editing bay, I started focusing more on what was inside the frame —titles, credits, the way words could be dangerous and paradoxical.
I took a summer job laying out text-books in Quark Express. This is when my “Fonts” folder began to grow. This is also when I developed an allergy. Not to pollen or cats, to the city itself, to the whole country even.
With Bush Jr. ascendant and the towers not yet descending, I moved back to Siracusa. After years in a city of neon and noise, I returned to a place with letters carved in stone, painted on shopfronts, fading on walls. I found a job in a local printing house (located in an ex-convent) maybe solely due to my being familiar with Mac computers. I played in bands, made posters, and designed without calling it design.
In 2003, with few prospects for meaningful employment, I left Sicily again. This time landing in Amsterdam, to study at the Rietveld Academie. There, everything clicked for me —typography, books, and printed matter of all kinds. Dot Dot Dot magazine was our north star. The Rietveld gave me the tools to articulate what I had already been doing instinctively. Only later did I realize what a fortune it had been to meet Linda Van Deursen, have lessons with Gerard Unger, and share invaluable experiences with teachers and students. It was also where I met Lina.
Lina and I moved to Vilnius following our graduation, planning to stay only a year. Embedding ourselves quickly into the city’s contemporary art scene, we designed printed matter for ŠMC, Tulips & Roses, and numerous artists who remain close friends. Vilnius, a city of raw ideas, allowed us to experiment with print, publishing, and typography. This was where I started to lay the groundwork for AlfaType—a foundry for the fonts I had been quietly designing all along.
By 2010, we had moved to Torino, another apparently temporary stop that became permanent. Our first major design commission was for Artissima, designing its identity and, of course, including a custom typeface. Torino is a city of signs—painted, gilded, fading. I started looking up at all the signs.
I was invited by Giorgio Camuffo to participate in the Graphic Design Worlds exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. A seminal exhibition showcasing the multifaceted nature of graphic design, highlighting the diverse approaches and interpretations within the field.
Around 2012, Lina Ozerkina and I founded Friends Make Books, a Risograph print house and design studio in Torino. We specialize in Risograph printing, offering a unique aesthetic and approach to print production. Over the past years, we’ve collaborated with numerous artists, producing small-edition books and prints. Our aim has always been to develop small-scale publishing models, encompassing all aspects of production—from concept and designs to printing and binding.
The machines have won. Language, stripped of form, circulates at the speed of capital. The state hails us as “content creators,” and yet, I pick up a chisel.
Whether letters hum in the background or stop you in your tracks, they are the means with which we record, erase, and rewrite our histories.
The worker writes, the writer types, the typographer kerns, the sign painter strokes, the stone carver chisels. Somewhere along the way, letters stopped resisting. But still, I keep messing with them.


(I can tell you other interesting things.)

Here is my contact information.
Here is sample of my work, this is my card,
and a few relevant links:
AlfaType Fonts
—Type Foundry Ritmo
—Type Foundry Alfa60 (with Lina Ozerkina)
—Graphic design studio Friends make Books
—Printing & Publishing il Letterista
—Hand-painted Signs Parli italiano?

My e-mail address is a bit awkward:
thisisjosephmiceli ♺ gmail dot (you-know-what).

If you’re looking for my phone number.
I’d rather not write it out here*.
Just write me and I’ll get back to you, or have a look at my card.
* Sorry, it’s not personal.

Thanks for your attention.

For (almost) everything else… My job is to watch words disappear. I insist on an economy of gestures. Insisting is most of the work. A craft we buried, then charged to exhume. I prefer to tell myself.