In memoriam Mitch Paone, 1982–2026

That was his whole method. And it applied to everything he made.

I invited him for a generative type design workshop at KABK in 2018 and we instantly became friends. He was one of those people where the connection is so immediate that there is a life before and a life after. His mind moved fast, faster than most people in the room, jumping between references and disciplines with enormous energy and joy. Underneath all of that he was soft, interested, asking questions. Genuinely kind and generous, and so modest that you sometimes had to remind yourself who you were sitting next to.

Mitch passed away peacefully in Chamonix in his house on June 23 2026. He was 43.

He co-founded DIA Studio with his partner Meg Donohoe in 2009 in SoHo, New York. What they built there revolutionized the field of graphic- and type design. He coined the term Kinetic Identity in 2015 to name what he had been discovering in his practice: a brand is behavior across time, with motion as its material. The work he created was everywhere, recognizable as DIA's even when you didn't know it was DIA's. And although they could have scaled it, Meg and he kept DIA purposefully small, choosing to stay hands-on from start to finish of every engagement. He and Meg were inducted into AGI, the Alliance Graphique Internationale, in 2019.

He was interested in whether the system was solid enough to sustain without him. "Longevity," he wrote on his LinkedIn, "is a design constraint. The frameworks we build operate without us. Software, protocols, and organizational structures each encode the governing principles of a system rather than its surface behavior."

He described himself as an anthropologist. "My core interest is the full set of systems underneath the artifacts." He had historical load baked into his work, with beauty holding the surface hook that pulled him in for more digging.

That is what sent him into type design. In true Mitch fashion, he kept going deeper, then deeper still. He began drawing typefaces by hand, learning the discipline from the inside out. In 2018 he and Meg launched MNKY Type together. Fourteen type families followed over a decade, each one starting from a single question: What if the Plantin font had block serifs? What if the launch of a typeface came with a generative tool, ephemeral by design, built to explore infinite variations and then disappear? Six years of research and building to answer one what if. Each family steeped in history, each one carrying that signature Mitch evolution: the deeper he went, the more he found. His curiosity had a way of leaving something beautiful behind.

But to really understand his design, you have to understand jazz.

Because, before he was a studio director he was a jazz pianist. He heard Herbie Hancock's Thrust as a teenager and something opened in him that never closed. He studied in New Orleans, recorded with his group Non-Static, and played the 2008 Winter Jazz Festival in New York. Music was how he thought, not something alongside the work. In the studio, they would sketch thirty, forty, a hundred iterations without once pausing to critique. Improvisation and systems thinking fed each other: free play within a rigorous structure, the same way a jazz musician stretches inside the chord changes. His piano and his typography were the same instrument.

To understand a bit more on where DIA sat, you have to understand the lineage Mitch himself traced. In his essay ‘Time Is the Material: From Motion Branding to Kinetic Identity,' published on Substack in November 2025, he mapped it in full: PBS in the 1970s, MTV in the 1980s, the UK studios of that decade, like 8vo and Octavo magazine, who brought Wolfgang Weingart's Swiss typographic rigour into club culture; Tomato, who fused cinematic thinking with structural type, or The Designers Republic and Build. In the US, Logan and MK12 were making work that was compositional, rhythmic, organised through time. These were not influences he acknowledged politely, and the lineage in which he consciously positioned himself inside. He wrote about all of it without vanity, more interested in the history than in his own place within it.

Last year we shared a panel at Us by Night in Antwerp alongside Florian Lamm, Alexia Mathieu, Angelo Benedetti, and Jonas Voegeli. We had an open, unscripted dialogue about design education. We talked about how AI, coding, and animation are transforming the classroom, how hybrid and post-pandemic models are reshaping student engagement, and the tension between preparing students for industry and protecting their creative voice. We got into the differences between institutional and DIY education, plagiarism and remix culture, and why history, typography, and craft still matter in a fast-moving digital world. As a moderator, Mitch listened more than he talked. But he had this way of landing on the thing everyone else was circling without quite reaching, and then moving on before anyone could make too much of it, keeping it light yet serious.

Mitch taught at HEAD Genève, ECAL, ZHdK, and KABK, and was the inaugural resident professor at La Becque x ECAL. Over a decade he gave more than a hundred lectures across twenty-five countries: the Walker Art Center, AGI Open, OFFF, Chaumont Biennale de Design Graphique. For Mitch, teaching was where ideas had to survive contact with people who had not yet internalized them. He lived in a space of discovery, and his students felt that. They came away not just with new tools but with a different relationship to not-knowing. He ran the classroom the same way he ran the studio: through ensemble thinking, iteration before critique, and to trust the body before the mind. The Fender Rhodes morning routine was not a warm-up but the actual lesson.

A whole generation of designers is indebted to his thinking and working: DIA was among the earliest to see what generative design could actually become. In the last months of his life he was writing sharply about AI, copyright, and what it means when the work a studio produces cannot be owned. He was rigorous about what technology had changed for the design field.
Mitch connected immediately, the way people do when their attention is completely real. Everyone who spent time with him left a little more certain of what they were doing and why. At least I was.

Mitch Paone was 43 and in the middle of everything.

"Time itself is being, and all being is time."
— Eihei Dogen, Uji, c.1240

His ideas, as he always intended, will keep running without him.

Roosje Klap is General and Artistic Director of Noorderlicht, platform for photography and lens-based media as well as founding director of THEA, a new institute for art and technology in Groningen, The Netherlands. Klap was co-head of the Graphic Design BA department and Non Linear Narrative MA at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague (KABK) between 2013-2022.