Renzo Dallavia
Partner · design direction
Twenty-two years of it, eleven of them in a packaging studio in Padua. Draws before he types, which is why there is a board in the corner that nobody else is allowed to move.
Fermo Nove · founded 2016 · Contrà del Guanto 9, Vicenza
Nine people and thirteen metres of plywood.
The south wall of the studio, kept for finished work · photographed 9 January 2026
We started because two of us were tired of showing work on a screen.
Agnese and Renzo left a larger studio in Padua in the spring of 2016 and took a first floor above a locksmith because it had one long unbroken wall and a goods lift. The lift mattered: everything we make gets printed at full size and carried up.
There are nine of us now and the arrangement has not changed. One room, one wall, one Friday meeting. We have never had a private office and we have never sent a client a PDF as the first sight of anything. If it cannot be pinned up, it is not finished.
We work mostly in the Veneto, for people who make or keep something — a mill, a market, a hospital, a goldsmith, a publisher. The thing they share is that their work is already good and badly described. That is the job.
Fermo Nove · a standing account
2016Founded
34Projects finished
9People on the floor
13Metres of wall
17Weeks, the average job
Set by hand from the studio case · corrected each January · Vicenza
Three of the nine
The partners and the person who sets most of what you will read. The other six — two designers, a writer, a production manager, a bookkeeper and an apprentice — are on the wall photograph above.
Agnese Brolo
Partner · strategy and words
Came out of local newspapers and still writes everything down before anyone draws. Runs the reading fortnight, takes the photographs, and is the one who says no to a brief.
Mira Sağlam
Senior designer · typography
Trained in Istanbul and Reading, joined in 2021. Sets the text on every book we make and keeps the argument about hyphenation going for the whole five years she has been here.
A bag prototype opened out flat and kept · the studio keeps every failed one
Friday, six o'clock
The only meeting we have never cancelled.
At six on Friday everything that is finished comes off the wall and goes into the archive upstairs. Everything new goes up. Whoever is standing nearest reads the four fields out loud — client, year, weeks, people — and if they cannot, the sheet comes down again until somebody can write them.
It takes about twenty minutes. It has caught a wrong colour, two misspelled client names, a project nobody had billed for four weeks, and the fact that one of us was working sixty-hour weeks and had told nobody.
- Starts
- 18.00, Friday, every week since March 2016
- Attends
- Everyone in the building, apprentice included
- Rule
- Four fields read aloud or the sheet comes down
Come and look
The wall is better than this website.
If you are within an hour of Vicenza, come on a Thursday afternoon and see the current one before it changes. There is no presentation and no biscuits. Write first — the goods lift is slow and we will meet you at the bottom.