Chiara Aliotta describes herself as a designer who wears many hats — graphic design, art direction, brand consulting — across print, editorial, UX and digital products. She founded the studio until Sunday, has worked with organizations including Joomla, PAMS Foundation, Smashing Magazine, Action Aid Hellas and Medicine South Frontiers, and lives on the Greek island of Syros. The through-line in all of it, she told Vitaly Friedman on the Smashing Podcast, is a belief in storytelling.
From Sicily to branding
Aliotta traces her path back to a five-year-old asking her mother whether any job paid you to draw every day. The answer — be a painter like your grandfather — stayed with her, even though she never met him. Paintings by him filled her grandmother's house, and that absent figure became the model she wanted to live up to.
She left Sicily at eighteen for the Polytechnic of Milan, a move that required convincing her family she could make a living from design; in Sicily at the time, architecture was the nearest familiar reference point. Her original plan was toys and furniture for children, but a master's in communication design introduced her to branding, and she never went back. Everything, she says, is a playground.
A brand is how people feel
Clients regularly arrive asking for a logo, a tagline or a color palette. Aliotta calls those things the identity, never the brand. The brand is what customers feel when they encounter a product or service — an emotional rather than physical thing, present at every touchpoint from an application to a brochure to a conference stand. It is the consistency of that experience that travels with you regardless of city.
She ties the shift to economics: when manufacturing physical products dominated and shelves held less competition, a logo and tagline could carry a company. Today the experience economy has made the brand a larger player.
On the boundaries of the work, she is blunt — it depends on the brief and the budget. Where tone of voice, illustrations or video editing are involved, she operates at a high level: setting tone, keywords, the direction others will interpret. A brand manual works like a script, and for digital products it can extend down into a design system. Execution of the fine detail is then handed to copywriters, illustrators and other specialists.
Standing for something
Friedman asked whether brands can still stay neutral. Aliotta's answer is that every brand is political in the sense of holding a culture, belief and values — the words themselves already stake a position. What changed is the audience: brands once addressed a mother with children or a father working late; now they address communities shaped by social media, where the sense of belonging is strong and a brand identifies with the community's values. Some people will be excluded as a result, and that is fine. Trying to please everyone usually fails anyway; loyalty to yourself and consistency matter more.
She credits a talk by Debbie Millman at a New York conference with capturing this: brands standing for a cause can become propellers of change, and every movement has in effect become a brand. Small individuals achieve little; communities can make big change.
Two senses of storytelling
The word covers two different things in her practice. A story can be an artifact — a narrative played out in front of an audience, like the Barilla advertising built around the family reunited over pasta, which made the product a symbol of family and has adapted as ideas of family broadened.
Separately, storytelling can be a methodology, a background layer used to work out what the message should be. Non-profits, she notes, often analyze the wrong side of a story — the effects of their actions rather than the outcome. Following the customer's journey to understand the emotional one lets you choose which story to promote: the child saved each day rather than the child lost, because the former supplies the climax. That approach does not necessarily become advertising; it becomes the narrative behind everything a team does and says. She sees it applying everywhere, because there are many ways to apply it and only the best scenario needs choosing.
The script stays backstage
There is a misconception to clear up. Aliotta does not walk into client meetings announcing a story. She first meets a client with all the questions needed to fill in her script, which stays private and becomes an article only if she writes one — as with the piece about the landing page built for a Smashing course. What the client eventually sees is the finished film, not the scenes that were cut.
She follows beginning, middle and end so the client knows what to expect, when and how, and can supply feedback at the right moments — the way a director asks an actor for a specific line. She draws on the story brand script from Donald Miller's book, filling in its blanks. Clients want the climax quickly rather than the full method; the payoff is the finished product, and the reaction to Smashing Book 6 remains a vivid example for Friedman of that moment when everything comes together.
That coherence, Friedman suggested, is why work feels right even when people cannot articulate why — elements with independent lives that ultimately behave like an orchestra, small discoveries left like a treasure hunt. Aliotta agreed and called that effect magic: the pleasure of a film that reveals something new on each viewing. It is the highest thing a designer can hope for, and the reason she trusts storytelling — it is what allows the pieces to work together, and later to be extended into sequels 
.
Scenes, thresholds and sequences
How the method plays out depends on the work. On branding projects, which involve more variables, she works through values, emotions and the actions wanted from users, and needs a plot. On a landing page she treats the page as a shot and splits it into three scenes — opening, middle and closing — then distributes the elements gathered from the client between the acts, placing gifts as a delight just before sign-up to propel the final action. She avoids dark patterns but still steers toward the ending.
For the Smashing course page she described the hard part as finding a central concept for a video course that would feel different and hold the curiosity of the most demanding possible audience — designers. The registration path, with its playful kitchen and food framing, was the toughest piece; the concept had to be transformed into something workable, fishcakes and all.
Documents that outlive the project
When she approaches a brand, there is usually a design brief: a blueprint a few pages long, holding the vision and mission, that tells anyone designing for the company which elements come into play. Alongside it sits the brand manual, and together they give the full picture. Aliotta supplies both. They suit startups in particular, including the blockchain startups she worked with over roughly two years during the pandemic, because an evolving product needs documents to follow.
For digital products the task is trickier. She provides extra interface elements that may be needed later — not a design system, just spare user-interface pieces — and otherwise leaves developer interpretation to take over. Some clients come back to ask whether a developer-designed component looks in brand; because she works by modules, reused pieces often fit well. Where a larger piece of design goes astray, she may be called in to review it, which reopens the work the way a sequel or another director picking up a story does. She counts those reviews as a useful refresh of the brand.
Friedman pointed to her upcoming workshop, The Power of Storytelling, running in March. Aliotta described it as a directed, high-level online course — not once upon a time, but a deep dive into the elements and methodologies of storytelling and how a user journey is divided and mapped. Participants write a script for a product or application every user will love, to learn how to make experiences memorable rather than simply beautiful. The mix touches user experience and a little interface design for digital products, but the methodology transfers to anything: pixel, print, or an experience for a venue. What matters is not how you decline it, but that it stays consistent.
Dreams and parting advice
Asked about a dream project, Aliotta said she is already close to the life she dreamt of, though new dreams keep arriving. One is to build a small empire around her storytelling methodology — a book, possibly a popup book, given her love of typography and children's popup books — and to become more of a mentor so others need not endure the same experience she did and can start at the end of the book. The other, underway for about two years, is a hub on Syros bringing together the designers who moved there to work remotely during the pandemic, alongside musicians, food experts and other professional creatives, with the island's design school as a foundation. She floated the idea of a Smashing summer edition on Syros.
Her message to future generations, in a world where storytelling is everywhere: design to put a smile on your customers' faces. If storytelling is one way to do it, use it — and if you know other ways, share them 
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