Our colleague Curro Toledo, designer at beon. Creativity, talks about “enthusiasm, effort, and time” as the values that transform any project into a great project.
What abilities or competencies should a designer display?
I really have a very versatile profile and I do not only work as a designer. At beon. I execute a more technical task than that of pure and plain design. I am comfortable in the production area and think of myself as a link between design and production departments, so I am always tackling with plans, structure measurements, and final arts. It is comforting to see how an interdisciplinary team as beon builds and executes so many projects. I like to facilitate, as far as possible, the work to my colleagues. In such complex projects involving so many profiles, it is essential to be able to hear and make yourself heard in order to work towards improving the project.
How would you define your own style?
You have to work with a multitude of styles, as many as clients are, since not always your personal style is the one that best fits the project. I believe more in honest design than in the fight of the ego to dominate us in making leadership decisions. Personally, I am interested, in terms of design currents, in minimalism, synthesis and geometric abstraction.
You usually work for different formats, how do you prepare for all these forms of approach?
A wide career in ephemeral architecture has allowed me to know and adapt myself to many types of projects; I am interested in the creation and distribution of spaces, from a political meeting, a TV program, a small stand, or a big event.
In my opinion, all the projects are presented from the same prism: we must determine the focus, the main actor of the event, and emphasize it with the stage design, knowing who and how they will look at it. It is not the same if it is a congress, a stand, or a meeting in which you need to broadcast on television and require a scenography that boost the protagonists, and not the other way round, something adequate that allows the audience to focus on the message.
In any case, it should be clear what we want to sell, as after all we are a communication group. Well, marketing is, as the Sex Pistols said once, “the great rock ‘n’ roll swindle”. Remember when the United States forces won the Iraq war and pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue? There is an image showing a rope around its neck and what seemed a huge, cheering crowd demolishing it, or this is what press and media emphasized and repeated then, over and over. With time, a more open angle image of the same picture shows that neither is a crowd, nor excited and, in addition, an US Army crane demolishes the statue. Well that summarizes the marketing process: one has to focus, choose the scene, and then shoot.
What do you think is the key to a great project?
The enthusiasm, the effort, and the time spent. Enthusiasm is what makes you fall in love with the project, effort what boosts your results, and time is what you invest on it. Everything helps to mature it and executing the best way possible. All projects have room for improvement, but of course, time is finite and much more in this work, where we have very tight deadlines.
Creatives are born or made?
A mixture of both options, I see it as that campaign of tires with the claim “Power is nothing without control”, meaning here that something must be very creative but if it does not serve a purpose, it will be pointless. In think that it is more honest when everything serves a purpose, without any fanfare. This is what Adolf Loos referred to in Ornament and Crime.
