The quarantine came quickly and forced us to stay home, isolated, away from the social contact we are used to. You might think that typeface designers were already stuck in caves before the pandemic anyway, but as I mentioned in an email exchange with one of my great teachers, Rubén Fontana, it’s one thing to choose solitude and another to have it imposed on you. In his own words, “It seems that humans cannot accept anything being imposed on us, not even for our own convenience”. So the question arises, is it possible to transform a situation that is imposed from the outside, into the protagonist of opportunity? Continue reading
Pet views
My husband and I live in a fourth floor apartment, with roughly 20 meters separating us from the row of apartment buildings in front of us. During the uneventful days of the confinement—which in Spain meant you could not leave your apartment except for necessary errands—every small thing became an event. Looking at the same scenery day after day one starts noticing details one hadn’t noticed before—the type of plants someone grows, the color of the brick of a certain building, and, the surprising number of pets inhabiting those buildings. Continue reading
start … keep going … finish
As, hopefully, these upside-down times have a beginning, a middle and an end, I’m choosing to write about three things in those categories I enjoyed a lot this year. Continue reading
Bette(r) Birds
2020 has been a bit of a grind, to say the least. Every morning we wake up to devastating news about the decline of our planet, the various threats to our health, racial injustice, inequality, police brutality, politics, wars, the economy, J. K. Rowling being an idiot. But against all odds, there are some things that keep us going even when everything around us starts to come crashing down.
And it appears that when it comes to self preservation my natural instinct is to go out and look at birds.
Coots actually have way larger feet than this.
How to find your inner compass as a lettering artist
Recently, Dominique Falla asked me to be part of Typism’s new podcast series, and talk about the concept of inner compass. After the recording was done, I realised that the notes I prepared for our interview could be valuable for many designers in the visual communication field, and not only for the ones interested in lettering. Below are my notes for anyone who’d find that useful.
What exactly is an inner compass?
For me, an inner compass is a set of principles to guide you through life and work, and to help you understand what things work and what things don’t work for you.