Paqui Porras is a digital designer at beon. Worldwide and knows well where to find inspiration to apply it to her daily work. Austin Kleon’s quote perfectly defines her savoir faire.
What are the skills required in a good designer?
Designers must be open minded professionals, ready to absorb everything that surrounds them. Be someone creative, non-judgmental, open to criticism and to a wide spectrum of approaches. Also, they must be passionate about their work, communicative, kind, positive and teamwork oriented, always a pursuer of excellence.
How a project becomes a great project?
Everything swivels in the way we look into people’s soul. In what they feel when they experience the outcome of our work.
In many projects we make designs for people who are not at all related with this world, people who work in banking, health, industrial sectors… there may be attendees who are not able to know if they like a design or not, they may not be able to describe what they saw at a particular event, or the type of materials we used, but what they will be able to remember and verbalize, at least the vast majority, is how we made them feel.
What you would love to design the most?
I am passionate about interior design. I love to design thinking on how people are going to dwell in the spaces we have analyzed, studied, reflected upon, and design for them. I love to bear this mind in any project we work in, it helps me to make people happy.
Where do you find inspiration?
Be a designer is a way of life. This is a profession that goes beyond the workplace, expanding through time. Once we leave the office, our work continues.
To observe people’s behavior and then see how we can apply it to our designs, learning about new materials, researching and reflecting how can we fit them into our work. Visit trade fairs, exhibitions, museums, furniture showrooms, surf the internet, and see how different societies see design in a completely different way, imbibing from all these sources.
Writer Austin Kleon describes in a very precise manner my way of working in this quote: “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
