In 2019, I got a request for an interview by Yukoren from BIU. For the short story, BIU is a Chinese platform which showcases artwork from artists — leaving in China — whos working in different area of creativity and they connect them to customers.
She contacted me via email and asked me questions about the Design Challenge Apollo 365°, in other words, my poster designs.
First things first, I want to thank Yukoren to find me, and for the questions, she asked me. They helped me to synthesize the project to myself and explain it as simple as possible to others. They also helped me to change my point of view from the actor to the viewer. Of course, her interest in my work tickles my ego.
The Interview
1 Where are you from?
I am from a small town of 4000 people sandwiched between two big hills in Switzerland.
My origin is from the Italian region of Switzerland (Ticino). The reason why my name sounds Italian.
1.1 And why you choose to live and work in China?
I met my wife on the Internet. I wanted to travel, and I was looking for friends in Asia.
After some years of chatting online, we met in person. We get good chemistry together, and we married in China.
She has a stable job in a high school as an English teacher. Conversely, my career as an independent graphic designer is still not steady.
We decided to establish us in her hometown because she thoughts that way is more secure.
Additionally, I like Chinese life and the people there. They warmly welcomed me, and they treat me well.
I don’t work in China. I only participate in some contest online there, and fortunately, I won two on three of them.
2 Why you want to be a Graphic Designer?
I drew a lot when I was young. I also was amazed by my game boy, video games, and books. I often asked myself how do they make that kind of stuff, how it works both digital and analog it was like magic to me.
In 1999, I was learning cooking. A friend of mine made a graffiti on a paper, and it blows my mind. After that, I started to draw hundreds of thousands of graffiti to develop my style. I imply myself in creativity since these days.
Some years later, I tried to enter a School of Visuals Arts, and I was accepted in. Unfortunately, after two years, it results in a significant failure due to two teachers working there who rejected me. This event made me stronger and give me the fire to do more.
After that sad experience, I tried to enter another School of Visual Arts in Bienne, Switzerland. I successfully finished my studies there, and it was the first fruits of my creative journey as a graphic designer.
To answer the question, except for the simple reason that I like graphic design, typography, illustration. I am a Graphic Designer because I wanted to prove myself I can do it whatever peoples say. I didn’t want to let them define me because of a fail.
I am the proof by the fact that it is possible to become what and who you want if you work hard on it. Additionally, I love to solve visual problems, draw an illustration, and create cool stuff! Or at least, I am trying to do so!
3 What’s your Graphic Design About?
For my project, it’s all about my deep self and what’s inside me. My life’s experiences, my visual knowledge, my intuition, feelings, emotions. it is all about self-exploration coupled with technological experimentation. The goal is to discover and elaborate on my style. I try to translate my feelings into visuals by using my instinct and forget a bit about the rules too.
3.1 What’ kind of idea do you want to express?
When I work with customers, it’s often about commercial design (packaging, logo, website, posters, and others).
Here, the goal is to express their idea, design their pieces of information, services, or products according to their brand strategy. You have to respect their needs, their rules, their community or users, and their ideas. Your creativity is a bit more difficult to express that way.
The place, where I express my ideas, is on my side projects. It is where I experiment and develop my visual language. Furthermore, it allows me to discover myself, and that helps me to push my limits every day a little bit further.
To conclude, I think I want to express new ideas, complex layouts, deep thoughts…
To make a long story short, I merely wish to express myself!
What’s a conclusion!
4 As we know, graphic design has lots of styles, what inspired you to design in a strong digital style? Or what kind of culture affected you a lot?
There are a lot of things that inspire me.
I often take a look at other creative areas such as fashion, illustration, motion design, art, music… there are a lot of thoughts, theories, and stories to learn from other disciplines as much as there are to learn from other people whatever they are, designer or not.
Of course, that is without forgetting reading a book about various topics. Knowledge is power! That inspires everybody!
Another way I inspire me is by trying to connect with other people.
Again, a creative person or not doesn’t matter.
When others are talking to me, I welcome their stories without thinking about how to answer them. I try to feel and understand them, I focus on listening and empathize with their problems and/or share their happiness. That brings me a lot of good things, such as motivation and hope. I am also able to see the world with the eyes of someone else, it’s a different point of view, and that’s priceless.
Observe the world is a crucial skill too.
From how the little insect near you act to the light’s reflection on a mountain during different moments of the day, observation is a vital and outstanding way to expand your knowledge. It is super important to keep open eyes on things that surround you, especially when you are in another country. That’s inspiring me!
4 As we know, graphic design has lots of styles, what inspired you to design in a strong digital style? Or what kind of culture affected you a lot?
It is a big word. It means many things according to different people. Culture is personal. It’s about people, their social environment and geographic position, their language, cuisine, social habits, music, art. Those characteristics shape our brain, the way we see life, our abilities.
To answer the question, I think yes, I am influenced by my own European culture. Especially the Swiss one.
Perfection, excellence, be constant and consistent with hard work. Those are essential personal qualities we share in Switzerland. Swiss-made! How does it sound?
Whatever my cultural background is, I stay open to the world. I strictly avoid any kind of allegiance to a flag or ethnic group. I am a man of the world, and we all belong to the same family!
As you can imagine, after spending three years in China, I am starting to impregnate myself into Chinese culture as second nature. My stepfamily is Chinese, my daughter is half-Chinese, my basketball friend. difficult to bypass this influence on me. But I am not sure if it influences my graphic design so much.
5 What makes you explore different kinds of possibilities of apollo’s sculpture?
Apollo’s Statue was just a pretext to start something as challenging myself upon my creativity. Coupled with the fact that I desired to expose my personal self and work in front of the Internet and its judgments. Sharing is caring. I must try uninhibited my internet anxiety to overpass it.
Moreover, I wanted to do something which comes from myself as well as an artist would do it by doing an introspection about my creativity. Instead of working for a client by analyzing its needs and solve is problems.
Apollo is just a god from Greek mythology. I quite like the picture of its sculpture. That is the reason why I decided to use it on each poster as a restriction to realize my challenge. Restriction help. And not!
6 What are these creative ideas from?
The 85,89% part of the time my ideas come from my thoughts, observations, and my perception of reality. I mean, I look inside myself to see what’s inside — occasionally it is empty and sometimes full of fresh ideas. It is always an in-depth analysis that I use as a process to create and generate ideas. I am seeking more personality for my designs.
In alike manner, my ideas can also be the result of intensive questioning, thinking, brainstorming, sketching, or even a reassessment about my life, skills… they also can come from a shape, a texture, a font, a reading, a tv series, t-shirts… The birth of an idea is always miraculous and can from nowhere as well as intensive researches. In both case it is satisfying.
Let me follow that up with an old adage – there is nothing new under the sun -. We all steal ideas to other creative — past and present artists — intentionally or not. We re-invent ourselves with — old and new — visual we saw before or by mixing two things together or re-create something based on the knowledge we learned somewhere else.
Discover new stuff or new idea is a rigorous process, and invent something new is improbable.
Is Inventing something new means to create a new atom nobody saw before? Do we invent things with an idea?
6.1 Will you feel stuck sometime?
From time to time, yes, I feel stuck or overwhelmed or even not motivated to create something.
When it happens, I relativize. I tell myself that it is only in my mind. It is nowhere else. Usually, it comes from a little burn-out or because I have too many things to do. It can come from a thousand of reasons.
When something is blocking my thoughts to dig deeper, I know the real obstacle is to find what hinders me. So, I examine the best way to unlock it as soon as possible. Go out, have a walk, talk or practice sport open a lot of opportunities for the brain. You have to relax.
If it is a lack of inspiration, I just go look for inspiration. But I don’t do it too much because that can block me more.
6.2 How to resolve these difficulties? (Apollo 365 poster design challenge)
How to resolve these difficulties? (Apollo 365 poster design challenge)
About Apollo 365, problems come periodically.
For example, these days I get problems to use Apollo’s Statue on my designs.
Firstly because I feel like if I already did everything I can do with this damned Statue — I acknowledge that I am far away from that.
Secondly, Apollo’s picture is figurative. His face tells a story, brings emotions to the viewer, he gets his own visual language, is his personal plastic qualities, and it starts to be tricky to make him say something else.
The dilemma is that I tend to produce numerous abstract shapes on my posters. The mix between Apollo, its figurative expression and the abstraction I want to inject in my designs brings me some visual and purposes troubles. Mix that two things together can produce unappealing results. It finally results in additional work.
7 Another essential thing to you except graphic design
Music is essential for imagination. Popular wisdom dictates that music is good for the soul and I agree with that saying.
When I was younger, I got a Metal Band where I was a shooter for some years. Now I am listening to a lot of different kinds of music with a slight preference for Reggae and Jazzy sounds.
Sport is also useful for the body, and it delivers your mind potential in terms of thinking differently. I played Ice Hockey, Football, Boxe and MMA during various steps of my life. Now, I play Basketball. I thank China for Basketball because I love this sport and when I am playing I can disconnect totally from my works and slight inconvenience of life!
Family and friends are vital for the support and the help they provide and express in many different ways and that, in any circumstances. It is also reassuring to know that we can count on someone.
Keep learning things outside my work’s scope, and passions are clearly necessary to open my mind and develop an awareness of my surroundings. I am curious, and I just like to know how things work, to feed this curiosity.
8 Do you think you can balance commercial and creativities?
It is difficult, but yes, it is possible with luck or persuasion, albeit with some degree of implication.
It depends on the position you are in, your situation, the type of clients you are dealing with. There is numerous case where you can be creative. Same in a commercial project.
It is easier if you are a creative director to inject your creativity instead of a freshly graduate graphic designer who follows orders and suggestions.
On the other hand, we can’t be 100% creative all the time.
Whatever we do, as graphic designers, we have to play a guessing game with customers. Prepare a meeting, research, ask questions, negotiate price, work, polish this work, get feedback, refine graphics, and suddenly answer a phone call as an example. The process of creativity can be long and tough. Creativity is everywhere and doesn’t solely belong to the design area. It can also be about how the way you think, make a joke, arrange on a plate, help others….
It is well known that graphic designers aren’t minds readers. Extract the right pieces of information from clients, understand what they really expect, wish, hope or simply mean by saying a word or another is finicky. Add ideas from yourself and gets the client acceptance is nearly unmanageable while you can create a concept around their beliefs and there is your way to be creative with a commercial project.
Providentially, some customers come to a particular designer because they know about their style and appreciate it. They saw the designer’s work on the Internet. This sort of client knows what they want, and that is an excellent point. They already know that the designer will be a good fit for them. That’s a nice case where they get in touch with you only for your personal style. That’s much easier for you to be creative in this way and mainly do what you like to do.
Whatever happens, it is always possible to add more or less of your creativity in commercial work and find the right balance in between. When you leave a school of Visual Arts, it is for realizing what’s others have in their head instead of an artist coming from a Fine Arts School who creates according to its own thoughts.
9 Describe yourself in a word
Versatile
10 What’s your attitude towards life
Every time I encounter trouble or problems in life, I just keep the focus on the bright side with a positive mindset. Although I need time to adapt to new situations because I tend to overreact easily, with some time, I find a way to deal, accept and move forward.
I like to say “when life sends shit on your face, don’t open your mouth.”
Learning and progressing makes me happy and smarter.
I like to imagine my “last year self” and the thinking I had at that time to notice how better I become now.
I am trying to keep a relatively healthy lifestyle both mentally and physically. A heavy smoker and Cola drinker can say that?
I also try to consume the least amount of energy, plastic bags… as possible. A small action to conserve the planet. We are unconscious about the damage she’s suffering from us. Keep an eye on my garbage to reduce them makes me feel a little bit better about myself.
11
Grow my brain by learning more. Work smarter, not harder. Profit about family, life, sports, travel, and friends.
Become helpful. Go to bed earlier. Sleep more to dream more.
Read more books, improve me to become a kinder and tolerant father, husband, friend, son, brother, teacher, graphic designer, and basketball player.
Why not eventually learn Chinese… and other languages. Be more creative… all that kind of stuff which makes me a utopian, a dreamer, a lover, a person, a human, nobody, no one and, nothing…
oh yeah! By the way, try to earn some money too!
