“To begin with I was amazed when I saw my designs in the city, now I’m used to it. The logo of Les Corts, the logo of the EMT, the palm tree … It’s nice. It’s also true that I’ve been working for a long time. I’ve been in the right place at the right time, I remember talking about it to Paco Bascuñán and saying, ‘You have to make the most of it.’ It was a very interesting time, but it was also hard. In the eighties we were making up for the delay we had compared to Europe, at least 25 years, altogether.”
“We didn’t have the necessary training, we faced up to life with no idea, with no access to role models (because of language, for example), we began with a handicap, everything was there to be done but it wasn’t so easy to do it. Everything was chaotic and it was necessary to find the path. We were young and intrepid. Ignorance launches you (laughs),” he explains.
“I risked a lot because I left things aside to take a creative route, but I didn’t really know which. My father was a farmer, my mother was a housewife … I wanted to do something artistic, but I had no role models to guide me. To begin with I went in for interior design. I discovered drawing for advertising when I went to college. That was what would later be the design school. All the teachers came from a fine arts background, so my training was very artistic with zero graphic design. I left with a lot of technical lagoons that I had to learn on my own. When you start working you see everything that you don’t know. The artistic knowledge, which I did have, I valued later. As a generation we bridge the gap between analogical and digital, we have seen both, and that also enriches you. Although it has its limitations, we have been quite privileged.”
“You are always in the hands of fate. The circumstances have been favourable, we have to thank providence because, it is true that we have a long track record, but you never know how each design will work. It’s a mystery. This is a very uncertain world, you are never absolutely sure it is going to work. Time is the judge, therefore you have to learn to relativize things,” concludes the winner of the 2020 National Design Award.