Matteo Gullà
Creative Director
0
MerriMural_v2_TN.jpg

Merrimack Mural

In 2017, I designed a mural for Merrimack College. Six years later, the college came back and asked me to do it again. That's the headline, honestly: a repeat commission from an institutional client who remembered the first mural well enough to hand me a second one. No pitch, no RFP — they came to me directly.

ROLE: Illustrator, Letterer & Muralist

YEAR: 2023 (original mural: 2017)

Discipline:

Illustration Hand Lettering Concept Development Client Direction

Merrimack College Mural

CLIENT: Merrimack College

THE ASK:

The brief was open but specific in spirit: revisit the campus, but don't just repeat the first mural. I built the new piece around vintage postcard lettering, paired with the landmarks that define how students, alumni, and visitors actually experience Merrimack — the spots people already recognize and photograph. The postcard framing gave the piece a nostalgic, collectible feel without leaning on anything I'd already done in 2017.

 
 
 

THE WORK:

The concept treats the mural like a postcard rack: each campus landmark gets its own hand-lettered "stop," tied together by a unified lettering style that reads as vintage travel ephemera rather than campus signage. It's meant to feel collected rather than commissioned — like something you'd pick up and want to send someone. Hand lettering carried the whole piece. Every headline and place name was drawn, not set — the kind of craft that doesn't scale to a big team, and doesn't need to. It's one point of view, applied consistently across every panel.

 
 

MY ROLE:

I worked with Merrimack College through PBD as the sole illustrator on this project, start to finish — concept, hand lettering, and final production-ready art. I developed the idea and delivered it myself, coordinating through PBD as the agency of record.

 
 

WHY IT MATTERS:

Not every project is a multi-year brand refresh with a team behind it. Some of the best signals of how someone works come from the small, solo projects — the ones where a partner trusts you enough to skip a new search and just ask for you by name, twice.