Isabel Lucena

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

In 1992, when I was 10, my family moved from Lisbon to Palo Alto, California. I remember being very excited with the number of materials and art supplies. Things like magic pens, fluorescent crayons, glitter glue, special scissors and many kinds of papers and stickers. In 1992, graphic design was much more playful, colorful and figurative in California than back home in Portugal. I spent a lot of time doing cards, folders, notepads and in school they took this very seriously. The following year my sister, my cousin and I started selling some drawings and cards to (kind) members of our family so we created a logo to mark our drawings. It read MIM (the I stands for Isabel). The logo was a great exercise in synthesis but it looks more like a logo for a metal workers union than an Art collective. This was all before touching a computer.

Where did you study and what were some of your first jobs?

I studied graphic design at the Lisbon Design Institute, IADE, where they focus teaching the more commercial side of design. Later, I joined the University of Applied Arts of Vienna (Universität für Angewandte Kunst), Austria, for one year, where the practice was the absolute opposite. And I did the Master Course of the Design Department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, which is two years. I remained three more years in Amsterdam where I freelanced. I developed projects for NIMK Netherlands Media Art Institute and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I worked briefly at the studio Thonik and learned a lot there. All very good experiences.

What role does digital design play in your studio in 2017, and how do you apply traditional graphic design skills in a digital age?

My work usually has a lot of handmade graphics. Either it is drawings, writings, collages, or some rough scans. And I like to mix them with the regular digital typography and computer-generated graphics. This mixture gives an imperfect or misplaced look that I enjoy. It also helps from keeping the process too mental and too stiff. I like to be a bit limited with possibilities (using real materials and textures around me) and also be surprised by accidentally finding an odd mixture that works. Many times what is used is the sketches the client did or some part of the research I did for the job. But I am still looking for what I like and what makes sense each time, so it's not a recipe, just a tendency.

Tell us a bit about yourself and the studio that you work for.

I work as an independent designer. I have worked briefly for some studios (thonik.nl, Atelier Pedro Falcão, NADA design e.g.) but mostly in isolated projects while keeping my own practice. Today I work by myself but have a shared workplace with other designers and I collaborate with great designers and friends like Marco Balesteros and Ana Freitas. I also teach Graphic Design at ETIC Escola de Tecnologias, Inovação e Criação in Lisbon.