Cinco

What are some of your earliest creative memories and what lead you into design?

This is a question that almost answers itself. Probably for all of us who are dedicated to this, it was our first creative memories that led us to design. Consciously or not, I think we all have that kind of need inside of us to connect with our inner child, to play freely with colors and shapes, to order and disorder letters, to disguise ourselves, to stain ourselves... It is a way of perpetrating and immortalizing one of the richest stages of our lives. In a world that feeds immaturity and suggestions to hide our age in order to pretend to be eternal youths when we are not at all, practicing children's behaviors like jealousy and avarice; in front of this world I feel that our profession is noble and sensible, and under no circumstances it doesn’t need to hide what we really are.

Give us the elevator pitch on what you do.

I am an art director and my specialization is not to be specialized in anything in particular at all. To work in one direction seems to me that it is dull and lifeless. How could it be possible that one person can have a good time in life doing always the same thing?

Many times I see people enslaved by their own style. We must lose the fear of non-specificity in our profession. I think that believing that one person is not able to have the capacity to do multiple things and in different styles, it is to underestimate oneself and the humankind as a whole.

What qualities and skills do you look for in a graduate?

Above all, a particular way of thinking and seeing the design world itself. Of course, they have to know and manage software tools but this is not going to be a distinction at all. On the contrary, learning how to handle software is within the reach of all nowadays, it is what ends up averaging and matching, standardizing the graduates. That's why I insist, the true differential is the way of seeing and thinking the design world, and I think that is missing quite lot today.

What career advice would you give your 16yr old self?

No matter how difficult it sounds at age 16, I would say do not rush, just be calm. The hurry itself does not necessarily make you win the race at all, or rather (and although it sounds half shaolin), the one that really wins is the one that enjoys the whole way through.