UP Design is a new design company which objective is to expand its vision of the Italian style and culture in Italy and around the world.

UP Design, which stands for Umberto Palermo Design, ex director of the Design Center I.DE.A Institute, is the key to the crisis of the piedmont design valley, where were born most of the talented Italian car designers. Umberto was born in Palermo in 1973, where he lived for the first years of his life. Then he moved to Milan where he took up his artistic studies and vision of the Italian style and culture in Italy and around the world.

UP Design was Umberto Palermo’s greatest desire and, after 18 years of experience collaborating with brands such as Fiat and Ariston Thermo, in October 2010 he left his post as Director of the Design Center I.DE.A Institute to take up an entrepreneurial experience along with Alessandro Fini (30 anni), a modern designer who found his maximum creativity in the 3D modeling and Alessandro Monticone (25 anni), a young marketing expert with the passion for design who collaborated with Palermo in all his projects in the last years.

Taken "Made in Italy" as a slogan, this startup intends to become a state-of-the-art design center "which concentrates his artistic soul on the extreme versatility of concepts and on the acute interpretation of shapes, all this translated into industrial items". The company announced the latest design excercice - the Vittoria supercoupe UP Design was at Bologna Motor Show in 2011. However, it was the Qatar Motor Show 2012, where the car was shown in full guise.

Next models by UP Design were Lucrezia concept presented in 2014, Mole (2015), Luce (2016) and Valentino (2016). In 2017 Mole Automobiles (a brand by UP Design) presented one-off Fiat 124 and in 2018 one-off project Mole Construzione Artigianale 001 based on Alfa Romeo 4C. Another special project Almas by Mole Automobile debuted at Geneva Motorshow in 2019.