Ingrid Picanyol was a punk as a teenager and, in a sense, she still is.
At the age of 16 she left her home in Torelló, in the Barcelona region of Osona, to form a band of misguided young women who made covers of La Polla Records and in which she “shouted, insulted and played the bass.”
She also, a crucial detail, was in charge of designing the
flyers
for the group's concerts with her then “very rudimentary” knowledge of tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
That was his first contact with graphic design, the profession he has practiced as an independent professional for 10 years and with which, as he tells us, he maintains “a very intense love-hate relationship.”
Today, punk retains the impetus, the joy, the taste for apparent simplicity and the resistance to being labeled.
She is especially perplexed that, in this era of liquid identities, there are those who insist on assigning their work such closed and reductionist labels as design “with love”, “with a gender perspective” or “sustainable”.
Picanyol (35 years old) has nothing against affection, feminism or ecology, but he perceives in his designs another series of ingredients that he hopes will not go unnoticed: “I think there is a quite peculiar sense of humor, very much mine, a certain way of looking at and understanding the world, and also a dose of lateral thinking, caprice and delirium.”
A jar with colored pencils.Vicens Giménez
Ingrid Picanyol, in her studio in Barcelona.Vicens Giménez
Responsible for the graphic image of the Torelló Mountain Film Festival, establishments such as Dalston Coffee, Otra Cosa or La Oficina del Parque, studios such as that of the architect Patricia Urquiola and brands such as Goa Organics, Oysho, Hidden Track Records, Minuet, Miansai or Jaume Jordà's organic wines, Picanyol repeatedly engages in unprejudiced and high-risk design, but considers that the truly bold are its clients: “I limit myself to thinking without inhibitions and proposing creative solutions to specific needs.
They are the ones who buy my idea, no matter how unconventional it may be, they bet on it and defend it in often very competitive environments.”
Raised in a city of 15,000 inhabitants just over an hour's drive from Barcelona, “very far away and, at the same time, very close to almost everything,” Ingrid owes her first name to a grandfather “with the soul of an artist” who He died very shortly after she was born: “He named me in honor of his favorite actress, Ingrid Bergman, and he already predicted that I was going to be a blonde girl with blue eyes and that I would end up devoting myself to some creative activity.
In some way, my grandfather projected his own concerns into my life.”
His older brother, a graffiti artist, instilled in him a healthy insolence and an interest in urban art.
She wanted to be a photographer, psychologist or philosophy teacher, but she ended up finding in graphic design a “realistic” professional option (she clarifies that hers was a “very humble” family) and compatible with her aesthetic concerns.
At just 21 years old, before concluding his training at the Escola d'Art de Vic, he entered a studio, Suki Design, where he looked at design “from the kitchen”, soaking up the inevitable tension between “creativity, pragmatism and routine” that is in the essence of the job.
Shortly after, she discovered the “stimulating and disruptive” work of a studio in Banyoles, En Serio, and she suffered her first professional identity crisis, “because it was what I wanted to do, but I still didn't know how.”
Guided by that impulse, she created her own studio in Barcelona in 2014 and has since continued to conceive her career as a succession of jumps without a network: “Among my most intense training experiences I would highlight the two periods in which I went from professional 'colonies' to New York and Mexico City.”
In the Big Apple, working for RoAndCo and Javas Lehn Studio, he spent six “unforgettable, stimulating at all levels” months, although somewhat burdened by the need to survive in one of the most expensive cities on the planet with a meager salary of 15 dollars daily.
Various wine bottle labels designed by Ingrid Picanyol.Vicens Giménez
Looking back, Picanyol concludes that his life has never lost the frenetic inertia of punk.
He started at full speed and has been burning through stages at breakneck speed: “I have never had time to stop and dream, look or envy.”
The rare moments of reflective introspection have come to her lately, in her role as an Art and Design teacher at the Barcelona school La Massana: “Teaching has served me, above all, to reaffirm my intuition that graphic design is something more that the technical response to a series of practical conditions, that what really makes the difference is the part of you, your identity and your vision of things, that you know how to leave in each project.”
This effort to “make your own mark” seems essential to him, but it is also exhausting.
Hence, consider throwing in the towel a minimum of two or three times a year.
“Until another project appears on the horizon that excites me and restores my passion for work.”
In the last edition of the Sevillian OFFF Festival, Picanyol was one of the guests at the Ladies, Wine & Design round table, where she attended to talk about the gender perspective and the
body positive
movement applied to graphic design.
The designer opted for the latter, but today she considers that “it is a perspective that has already become obsolete, because it continued to focus on women's bodies, when the true overcoming of stereotypes would be more of an attitude.”
body neutral”
, that is, “without prejudices, without conditions, open to authentic diversity”, which is what makes life “interesting”.
That is another of the lessons that Ingrid Picanyol learned from punk.
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