Archives for February 2016

27th February 2016 - No Comments!

Masala by Jibóia

Lisbon is all trendy and cool nowadays but on the very edge of it, the freshest tunes will be played by Jibóia. The guitar of Óscar and the drums by Ricardo Martins will definitely keep you going on these hypnotic and vibrant oriental rhythms. It will make you feel like travelling in a midnight train where everyone's body is asleep while their minds are dancing to this groovy album.
Design and Art Direction by my lovely friend Margarida Borges and Photography by Luís Martins.

24th February 2016 - No Comments!

Weekend in Jersey

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Last Friday morning I flew Jersey. A beautiful island in the north of France, shared by French and English culture. Although it's winter and the weather can be quite terrible for footpaths close to the sea, I still fell in love by the amazing places that this islands has to offer. Besides all of these amazing places to visit and explore I was quite surprised by the diversified signage that you can find in Jersey's villages. Engraved stone, metallic scripts, golden foil on windows, painted tiles, you name it. A lot of different styles too. And as a designer I was quite surprised by this. If you're living in London it's just an hour flight from Gatwick to get there. Plan ahead and you manage to see the whole island in couple days. It could be less, but this is not London, and therefore you have to be aware that, depending on the bus that you need to take, you might have one bus in every 2 hours.
You can see all the photos that I took in my flickr album.

12th February 2016 - No Comments!

The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic

I bought this book and the Design as Art I went to The World of Charles and Ray Eames exhibition at the Barbican. I would like to read these two books because they reflect on a quite specific theme: design and culture. The Language of Things turned out to be a great book to understand how design is able to influence and take part of someone's opinion or choices. This book is great because it makes you reflect on very specific matter with great examples that most of the times we applaud and nod our heads without questioning.
I highly recommend this book because it helps to define the language of the world we live in and what we can do (or ask) to better understand it and, as a designer, to produce better work. Which doesn't need to be necessarily useful.

If I had to elaborate a question based on this book I would ask: Why does design need to be useful? And if it's not necessary is it still design?

Most of you know Starck's citrus-squeezer is not highly functional but that was not his point:

"It's not meant to squeeze lemons, it is meant to start conversations." Philippe Starck

It's great to know the how but it's also important to know the why. And sometimes the why can be something greater than what we are designing at that moment.

12th February 2016 - No Comments!

Trip to Rome

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In the end of January, I went for four days to Rome. And it is indeed a beautiful city. One of those where literally you only feel like walking around and everything you'll see might be even better looking than what you saw earlier in that day. I like to call it an open air museum. You have plenty of things to see and you can put your mind at ease because you'll definitely not see even a 1/10 of what this city has to offer. I've seen quite a lot of images of this city before this trip and even before what design was. It's the city where students don't need books with images as they have everything there. It's incredible.

I took some photos of the city, because I would love to keep some souvenirs from the city, but I also wanted to have a different eye on the things that I see. You know, there are so many good photos of things that I saw in Rome. I just felt that it was ok try to show something else or at least with a different perspective from the photos that you find when you search for Rome images in Google.