Brand identity designer · Milan / Remote · Design.Gives contributor since 2022
Elena Marchetti is a Milan-based brand identity designer with eight years of experience working across nonprofits, cultural institutions, and social enterprises. She specialises in creating visual systems that feel alive — brands with personality, depth, and the kind of internal logic that scales gracefully.
Her commercial work has spanned clients in publishing, hospitality, and the arts. But the projects she talks about most are the ones where design had a measurable human impact: the food bank that tripled donations after a rebrand, the migrant services organization whose new identity opened doors to government partnerships.
She joined Design.Gives in 2022 after completing her first pro bono project independently and realizing the gap between organizational design need and design community willingness to help was a logistics problem, not a will problem. Three projects in, she's donated 48 hours and has no plans to stop.
"The thing I didn't expect," she says, "was how much I got back. Every nonprofit project has taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way — about constraint, about emotional resonance, about what design looks like when the stakes are real."
Logo systems, brand architecture, visual identity guidelines built to last across teams and time zones.
Color, typography, motion principles, iconography — everything a design system needs to be truly usable.
Photography direction, layout principles, and the visual language decisions that unify campaigns and collateral.
Logo animations, brand motion guidelines, and short-form animated assets for digital campaigns.
Full rebrand for a marine conservation nonprofit — logo, brand guidelines, digital templates, and a motion language across 12 country offices.
Exhibition identity for a retrospective of Italian graphic design at Palazzo Reale, Milan. Posters, wayfinding, catalogue design.
40+ custom illustrations for an education nonprofit serving Indigenous youth, celebrating cultural identity and the natural world.
Opening title sequence and full motion identity for an emerging European film festival. Animated logo, transition templates, and social motion assets.
Warm, accessible brand identity for a youth mental health nonprofit. A visual language that destigmatizes the conversation.
A geometric display typeface built for cultural institutions. Available under SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
"Elena didn't just give us a new logo. She gave us a language to talk about our work — one that finally matches the importance of what we're trying to protect."
"Working with Elena felt like a collaboration between equals. She listened before she designed, and the result was a brand that felt genuinely ours."
"The Visual identity Elena created helped us open doors that had been closed for years. We suddenly looked like an organization people could trust."
"Elena has a rare quality: she understands that the best design for a cultural institution feels inevitable in hindsight. Nothing looks imposed."