Uncategorized My Design Story

So here I am, putting it into words. This is to encourage The community of passionate designers, university designers, self-taught designers, people who are at the beginning of their journey, or for multi-faceted creatives that have a longing to get into design.

Before you read, I am not self-made, I have been a sponge of design for 30 years. Even though my design studio began in 2015, I’ve been in a relationship with design for a long time, working on collaborative projects as a freelancer.

My biggest advice and advantage in my story is time to explore and play. Design is a felt process that takes years of experimentation.

A walk back in time.

I was fortunate enough to have access to graphic design classes in high school. This is not the case in most schools or high schools across the US. I grew up in Brasil, and this wonderful experience began when I left my hometown to go to study in the United States at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, where there is a strong investment in creativity and arts culture. I took my first graphic design class when I was 14/15 years old and I kept asking the school to make more levels of the subject. Level 3 was the highest, which wasn’t enough for me.

I negotiated with the school board to give me a blank “arts credit” if I attended the Level 3 class again but created my own projects in collaboration with my teacher. I was very fortunate that the school and my teacher were supportive of this. In my senior year, I took Graphic Design at my local Community College, PCC, which gives free education to high school students.

I’m grateful and privileged for this early exposure and conviction to pursue design. I got to use this time to move through a lot of bad design, trial and error, crafting tacky posters, playing with the 3D tool and exploring the vastest of adobe suite tools. It was a playground.

When the question was asked “what do you want to study at University?” I couldn’t think beyond “well, I guess, graphic design?”. I didn’t know what a design career path would look like and neither did my parents. My mom was kind of supportive. She imagined I would draw for a living. 

My mother, being a very intelligent and proactive woman when it came to career, schooling, ambition, advocating for ourselves and personal responsibility sent me out to find creativity in the real world. To face my own experiences and improve my skills, so I met several designers in my neighborhood. Although I was not interested in the technical aspect of re-creating photorealistic, interactive shoe models it expanded my perspective on the design field. I began building a curiosity for the far-reaching elements of graphic design and was obsessed with going to my local bookstore and consuming as many graphic design books as I could. My early interests were hand drawn funky typography, collage art and dada influenced editorial layouts.

At the beginning of my senior year, I communicated with my Mother and my Grandmother that graphic design was an expansive field, that I wanted to pursue it, and I showed them all that I had learned. They raised me pretty headstrong, so, even though they didn’t “get it” they could sense that I was passionate and I was going to pursue it.