Barcelona came at the perfect time, we hopped on a plane to go look at design somewhere else and at some point things felt less blurry (at least for a little bit).
One of my highlights: our visit to the studio LoSiento. Before we went there I looked at their portfolio and admired their work, but seeing the whole analogue and experimental process behind it really shifted something in me. They approach design not just as something that lives on a screen or in a PDF, but as something physical. Printed, folded, cut, built, poured, glued, photographed. Everything they do starts with their hands. It reminded me that good ideas don’t have to start in Illustrator. They can start with scissors, weird materials, or just curiosity. That mindset of playful experimentation is something I want to bring more into my own process this semester. I sometimes get caught up in refining too early, but LoSiento made me want to loosen up and trust the process, quite literally.
The next days at the OFFF Festival, the keynote that stuck with me the most came from DixonBaxi, the studio behind the rebranding of Formula 1 which launched this year. I’d seen the work before but hearing them explain their thinking hit differently. They spoke about how they wanted to design something that felt faster, more open, more future-oriented. It wasn’t about redesigning a logo, it was rather about reshaping a whole experience around the sport. As someone exploring motorsport through a design lens, that talk gave me a kind of permission to not treat some things as untouchable, and to think about what stories visuals are really telling. They mentioned “designing for emotion, not decoration” and I’ve been repeating that line in my head ever since. There was also a keynote from Lauren Heartstone about the redesign of sports graphics, again focussing on their work for the new Formula 1 Race Graphics. I also loved the approach of this new era in sports design.
So all in all I actually got quite some inspiration in Barcelona, which also leads me to want to further experiment with analogue printing whilst also looking more into (motor)sports design and a way to combine those things for my master project.
