According to the our new tradition, on Sunday July 8th, I opened the doors of my studio for the second time. At the main room, old and new artwork were exhibited, including personal projects, commercial work, my book, products, and some sneak peaks of projects that are to come. In the seminar room, we exhibited the work of the 10 international attendees of this year's summer lettering seminar.
Once again, it was a pleasure to welcome designers and letter aficionados and share with them a part of the bulk of work I've done throughout these years.
The doors opened at 7:00 pm and visitors could come in and out to see the exhibition for the following two hours. Around 7:30 pm, I made an introduction to what was exhibited. Having learned from last's year experience, we designed a more curated exhibition that was chronologically displayed to help me tell the story of my career and some important aspects of my working culture that helped me standout and be noticed.
I started by introducing two self-initiated projects that helped kicking off my career as a lettering artist: Lettering vs Calligraphy, and Letter Collections. I explained the importance of being our own clients and inventing excuses to create new content that will help us grow our portfolios while we practise and gain self-confidence.
I also shared insights on my process by explaining all the steps, from the first thumbnail sketches, the refinement of the hand sketch, the digitisation, and the final steps of adding color and texture. This is the work process that I use for my commercial work as well as for my teaching, which is nowadays a big part of my work. Having optimised my work process, triggered a more sustainable and professional work with clients.
I dedicated some minutes to explain the values of the studio, from the anecdote of the very first promotional material 3 for 13, that helped me pitch my agent Handsome Frank to how I set standards for my work and always work to get better.
I commented about my book Lust auf Lettering that was first published in German in 2016. Princeton Architectural Press then translated and rereleased it in 2017 as The Golden Secrets of Lettering, continuing with French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish versions. All of them were exhibited and I showed some of the hand sketches I drawn while writing the book and explained about the process of writing, drawing and editing my own book.
I usually say that lettering is about story telling with letters and it's about communicating an idea, creating an atmosphere and speaking to an audience. To exemplify this, I showed book covers I created in the last years and explained how one image can help communicate the overall idea of the atmosphere of a book. Similarly, magazine covers are a window to the main topic of an issue.
I also dedicated a part of the exhibition to my latest self-initiated project Martina Flor Goods. I talked about the challenge of bringing my letters to the tridimensional world, into small products that people would use or wear. This project has been online for almost 2 years and I can't be more proud of this small collection of products that aims to bring beautiful typography into everyday life.
To continue, I spoke about my up-coming projects: I showed some sneak peaks and explained a bit about my desire of taking the studio work forward year after year. This desire, together with an active attitude makes me want to go out there in the search of new opportunities and challenges.
Finally, I pointed out the corner we dedicated to the workshops, online classes and other teaching experiences the studio offers. I told about my teaching career, from the first workshop I taught for free to teaching internationally and giving talks to massive crowds. I ended up taking about the latest teaching experience I offer: the summer lettering seminar and invited all of the visitors to take a look at the atendees's exhibition in the seminar room where new lettering talents had been working hard for the past 3 days.
The exhibition was set up mostly by my team; Josefina, Soraya and Sebastian.
Thank you to all that came and chatted with me. And to those that couldn't make it –you can watch the talk of the open studio here.