Born in Turin in 1917, he attended the Vigliardi Paravia typographic school where Ezio D’Errico, an abstract painter, introduced him to contemporary art, which he would always look at with great interest. In 1937, at the age of twenty, he won his first competition for the creation of a poster, a geometric design created for the ICI typographic color house. After the war he worked for important companies such as Martini & Rossi, Carpano, Borsalino and Pirelli. He also worked as an illustrator for publishing and created a small graphics studio; in 1956 the Testa agency was founded, dedicated to advertising, not only graphic but also television.

Some of the companies that used the Testa agency soon became industry leaders: Lavazza, Sasso, Carpano, Simmenthal, Lines. In 1958, it won the national competition for the official poster of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Then, between the 1950s and 1970s, images and animations filmed for television were created that have remained in the history of advertising, linked to slogans that have entered common language: the graphic play between black/white and positive/negative for the Antonetto digestive (1960); the perfect geometries of the sphere suspended on the half sphere for the Punt e Mes aperitif, which in Piedmontese dialect means precisely “a point and a half” (1960); the conical puppets of Caballero and Carmencita for Lavazza’s Paulista coffee (1960); Pippo the blue hippopotamus for Lines diapers (1964); the spherical inhabitants of the planet Papalla for Philco (1969).

As the first institutional recognition of his work, he was invited to hold the chair of Print Design and Composition at the Polytechnic of Turin from 1965 to 1971. In 1968 he received the Gold Medal from the Ministry of Public Education for his contribution to the Visual Arts, while in 1975 the Italian Advertising Federation awarded him the Gold Medal in recognition of his successes abroad. Since the mid-1980s, Armando Testa, in addition to advertising itself, has been involved in the design of posters for cultural and social events and institutions, from Amnesty International to the Red Cross, from the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto to the Teatro Regio in Turin. He also created the logos that distinguish cultural institutions such as the Salone del Libro and the Festival Cinema Giovani in Turin, and the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art. His agency became the largest among those operating in that sector in Italy, with offices in the most important European countries. Armando Testa died in Turin in 1992.