Buongiorno!

I’m Alessandro Mingione, an interaction designer from Rome, Italy, living in Northern California. I’ve recently joined Tailscale as their second designer—I’m excited! I’m also contracting for early stage startups, bootstrapping product ideas and hiring their first designer.

Previously, I spent 7 years working at Palantir where I wore many hats (from Product Designer to makeshift PM to front-end dabbler) on a series of experimental products that became the foundation of Palantir Foundry, Palantir’s commercial data integration platform. During my last 1 1/2 years there I led Design for the Foundry Security product area and collaborated with the Privacy & Civil Liberties team to create technology that promotes responsible data usage and supports privacy by design.

In a past life I worked in the Rome contemporary art scene, helping individuals, galleries, and indie publishers define their identities through print and web, with clients like CURA, AlbumArte, and MONITOR.

In 2010 I co-founded ALA, a non-profit that organizes workshops where precollege students and contemporary artists work together to experiment new education paradigms based on hands-on collaboration. We are still alive and kicking!

While I’m mostly self-taught and dropped out of school thrice, I was trained in The Old Ways: I learned the dark art of type design in Leipzig, Germany, under Fred Smeijers, and studied editorial design in Rome, under Francesco Mazzenga.

When I’m not designing you may find me sipping Taiwanese oolongs, hunting vintage menswear, and listening to hard bop and funky jazz.