Alo, I'm Facu!

Planted: Jun 23, 1995. Last tended:

Let's start from the beginning. Spent my first 24 years of my life being raised, nurtured, and living with mom and dad in a small place named Progreso, which we call a city, but depending on where you're reading this from you might call it a town, a village, or as my uni colleagues would say, a cow farm. Yes, I'm basically Uruguay's midwest princess quirky designer, at your service. Now I live in the real city of Montevideo, although sometimes I miss the perfectly silent sleep and inocuous countryside cycling of my town of origin.

From a young age I have been drawn to the visual world, being a crafts workshop for kids a space I remember fondly where I would get dirt on my hands and create scrappy art projects I'd bring home. Then came the digital age. In a windows 95 computer in my aunt's home I started using Paint. When my brother got the first computer in our house, I got to have my own version of the program and go nuts painting and having fun with lines, shapes and fills. So once I got my own windows XP computer, I started toying around with Photoshop and doing fan arts for pop stars' facebook groups. So when I had to choose what to do after high school, I knew graphic design was the choice.

As someone who has explored various areas of the Design industry, including Digital, Email, Graphic, Editorial, and currently Product, I believe that the most accurate way to name my profession is simply "Designer." To me, Design is a mindset that allows for easy adaptation into any specialization, with the methods to learn and adapt seamlessly into new design contexts.

I owe this comprehensive and broad perspective to the different design jobs and education experiences I have had. This mindset leads me to think outside the box and be on the lookout for topics, ideas, or learning experiences that may not match my current profession at first glance. But with the Design mindset, I can connect these seemingly unrelated topics to my daily work.

Currently, my focus is on Product Design, which was a detour from my mostly Graphic Design past. I decided to stick to this area because it indulges the more structured and methodical side of my personality. Unlike Graphic Design, Product Design takes on the entire project from beginning to end, allowing me to bring both my creative and research-oriented selves to the table.

But on parallel I have been developing growing interests around art. My textile practice, embroidery and cross stitching, have become a channel to express my ideas, feeling and interests in a visual and tactile way. Have gotten into loophole of learning about the poetic, handmade and slow web, and applying that to this digital garden, as well as trying to learn more about it and dipping my toes on the slow tech digital pond. Graphic design-wise, I have been drawn to the old school methods: cut and paste, scanning, photograph, physical distort, etc. All of these interests are starting to converge mostly in topics of queernes, slowness and tenderness, with the over arching theme of reinterpretation. Let's see where that leads.