Interview with Pol Pérez & Judit Musachs: on travel and designing SOUVENIRS
SOUVENIRS is my first art book. With new original drawings, poetry and the occasional recipe, the book features a collection of my travel memoirs since childhood, reflecting on the themes of belonging, alienation, growing up, and the timeless relationship between culture and food.
The book was crowdfunded in June 2021 we are working to publish it by Winter 2021. You can pre-order the book here.
Stories are universal. They offer us a way of making sense of our world. Whether those stories are memories of friendship or betrayal; joy or longing; stories about heartache or chance encounters and falling in love, this is a uniquely human experience. All of this bound up in a beautiful, limited edition art piece and collectible item, in both English and Portuguese.
SOUVENIRS is a collectible artefact with unique cover options.
I'm so excited to bring in Pol Pérez and Judit Musachs to work on the design of this publication! They've worked on iconic print pieces like A Flamenco Catharsis, so SOUVENIRS is certainly in extremely talented hands. Below we discuss their work on the book, their creative process, and the power of travel to shape our lives, personal growth and professional practice.
You can also watch my live conversation with Pol here.
Pol Pérez is an art director and designer who lives in Barcelona. He teaches at ELISAVA, the school of design and engineering, at the Masters programme in Editorial Design. Pol has worked in many iconic design studios, co-founded Affaire Projects and now is in a new chapter with his own Studiopol, since 2020, working alongside Judit Musachs.
Judit Musachs is a graphic designer also living in Barcelona. She is a freelancer and has collaborated with emblematic studios like Ana Domínguez and Oficina de Disseny, has lived and worked in London and Amsterdam, and most recently has been collaborating with Studiopol.
Describe your work and aesthetic.
We work together a lot, but that of course doesn't preclude us from having very different personalities that become apparent on the design we do individually. At work, Pol strives to get the concept and the tone right, and for him everything tends to be deliberate, meditated. Resultingly, his projects often place a lot of intent on small gestures and decisions (typography, color, format…): things are precise and rarely overpowering. Judit, on the other hand, lets emotions guide her design and through her decisions she usually seeks to capture a specific atmosphere: she's the most visceral and explosive of the two. If Pol's work typically relies on the smallest of details, Judit's comes from her overarching view of the work and a desire to piece together a unique mood – this is something that, when working together, results in a well balanced midway point between the two.
That being said, we are in constant change. While it's true that our individual traits can be told apart when looking at our projects, our way of working is highly influenced by the other's just as it is by our own experiences and everything we encounter on our daily life.
What are you working on at the moment?
Your book is one of the things we're doing together ☺ as is the design of a record that will be released in September; the visual identity of a pop-up bar in Munich; and the website of a media outlet. We collaborate with the agency Pol worked at when we lived in the Netherlands whenever they can use our help. We also have separate projects we do individually, and Pol teaches editorial design every other week.
You have both worked on iconic design pieces and publications, and are both award-winning designers in your separate practices. You are also partners in life and in work. How and why did you both start working together?
We have worked together in one way or another since we became a couple. Our job makes it very difficult for us not to bring the work into our personal lives, and we have always relied on each other's opinion to make sense of the decisions we make and the direction our projects take. This dynamic accelerated the moment Pol started working on his own (ie. from home), which coincided with the peak of the pandemic: we started spending a lot more time together, and sharing so many work- and rest hours inevitably resulted in sharing the work a lot more, which in turn led us to help each other on almost everything, as the line that separated one's projects from the other's gradually blurred.
This of course wouldn't happen were it not for the fact that we trust each other, and our respective points of view, a lot. As we've mentioned above, we're very different people but we happen to make a good match when it comes to work. We ultimately have the same goals and very similar taste – what changes is our individual way of getting to what we want.
When I started working on SOUVENIRS together with you, I felt a powerful connection with the both of you because I felt like you deeply understood the objective of this project, which revolves primarily around travel, memory and emotion. How has travel affected your life, your personal growth and your professional practice?
It has affected every aspect of our lives a great deal!
We aren't the kind of people who spend much time planning our travels in advance: while we do like to learn before travelling about the few places we wouldn't want to miss for anything in the world, we generally prefer to improvise and get to know a place by simply walking around. But this wasn't the case in one of our first trips. As it turns out, six months into our relationship we decided to travel to Japan. In that occasion we did spend the preceding months preparing for the trip: we perceived it as such an extraordinary event – something that wouldn't happen again for a long time – that we didn't want to waste any of it, and that process made us get to know each other better. Making decisions on what to do, where to go and what to see made us aware of how similar our interests actually were.
After that trip – which was life altering, as neither of us had set foot in Asia before – we realized that life in Barcelona, and in such a familiar context, made us feel constrained: we felt that we needed to have more of those experiences. This probably had a lot to do with the moment each of us was going through. Moving to Amsterdam wound up being one such experience, and in the nine months we spent there we came into contact with a way of life that was different from the one we have here – which goes on to illustrate that one doesn't need to go too far to discover a different approach to a reality that is essentially the same. These experiences have also helped us to put in perspective our everyday life, and to realize that we're very restrained by the habits and customs of the place we live in.
Regarding our professional life, one of the ways in which travel affects us is the state of mind we develop during travel, and how it lingers at the moment of actually going back to work. When we travel we let ourselves get carried away, surprised, moved, by the discovery of things and ways of life we didn't know about, and that sets something in motion inside us: an eagerness to be surprised with what we do on a daily basis, that eventually reaches our work. This doesn't mean that our design will show traces of a place after having visited it; but you'll probably find a higher dose of optimism, or a greater emotional investment in the project.
At the end of the day, graphic design revolves around visual perception, and our work is inevitably influenced by the culture of the places we visit. The more experiences we have; the more different things we live through; the more things we know… the more resources we have to convey abstract ideas or sensations. This is the same for everybody – we're all influenced in one way or another by the things we live, and we're no exception.
When we started to collaborate on the book, something that really excited me was your idea of making the book itself into an artistic piece and have the covers be unique for each book, making the object itself a work of art instead of simply a catalogue of works. Can you walk us through the process of this decision?
It's hard to talk about the process of reaching such a decision, because ideas like this rarely come from a trial and error process – they often come from intuition: the same way you just know when a work of yours is right, our experience over the years allows us to detach ourselves from the rational process of taking the decision, and just accepting that we think it's the right thing to do.
When it comes to the reasoning behind the idea, it's a slightly different story. What brought us to the conclusion that the cover (and by extension, the book as an object) had to feel like a work in its own right is the fact that the book is weaved around a single, even if subjective, personal story. It's not a collection of works, an it's not a retrospective; it certainly isn't an exhibition catalogue for a group show. What it is, is a personal experience: one that's alive and is told through an array of different media (drawings, poems, photographs and other clippings from your life). Thinking the cover like an artwork is our way of sidestepping closure: by making the cover into a drawing, and devising each cover as a different thing, what we strive to do is create the perception that this is a living story that carries forward after the book. This is something we feel would be lost if we limited ourselves to choosing one of the drawings included in the book, and more so if it was framed as a "cover featuring a drawing" (hence the thought that "the cover is a drawing"). The book is ultimately a reflection of your personal journey – even if it's your own (as in Marina's), we think it will resonate with your readers: its bias is precisely what gives it different layers of meaning, different interpretations, and that's why we think each cover should be different.
It should be pointed out that whether or not each cover gets to be a unique work still depends on making it technically possible. We believe that the idea fits the book perfectly, but as is the case in every design project, there'll come a time where we'll have to stage a wrestling match between our creative desires and the various production processes to make sure that the idea can be executed within our budget. It's a part of graphic design that often gets overlooked, but is also very rewarding: to manage to make the most out of the resources at hand, and to reach the sweet spot between the comfort of an industrial production, where everything goes according to plan, and the flexibility of artisanal manufacturing, where everything's possible (and everything is also an immense headache).
One of my main purposes with this book is to find peace of mind and fulfilment through revisiting my travel memories. To make sense of how these moments have affected my life, and also to inspire my readers to do the same. This purpose was deeply heightened when the travel restrictions came in place due to the global pandemic. How do you feel the restriction of movement has affected the way you think about travel, and the way you remember previous trips?
Covid restrictions have led us to appreciate even more the privilege we've been granted as people who live (relatively) free of economic hardship, and who can afford to travel from time to time. It's something that we really miss, and maybe because of it we've tried to compensate our lack of travel with a search for novelty near home: we've been closer to nature than ever, we've visited parts of Barcelona we had never been to…
It bears mentioning that the pandemic hit right at a time that was perhaps the most adventurous of our lives. We were at a golden age of our mobility, and we had just returned from Amsterdam. When you stop dead in your tracks after a long time of doing something that is so rewarding; when you're asked to lock yourself at home and take it graciously, you must also realize how fortunate you are – and we should be able to appreciate all that we can get, and accept that we're ok not having so many external sources of amusement. The moment has, without a doubt, made us return to the memories of our trips and idealize them, but it's also forced us to reckon with the fact that we've taken all these things for granted, and we've gotten used to depending on the thrills that free travel offered us.
What is your favourite travel memory?
Our arrival in Japan, hands down. We landed on the airport of Narita (Tokyo) after a nightmarish low-cost flight that lasted nearly 16 hours (stopover included). After a couple hours of paperwork where we were given access to portable internet and a train pass that would allow us to move freely around the country, we got on a train to Kyoto that turned out to be headed someplace else. Our mistake sorted out, we finally reached Kyoto at night, and hopped on a bus only to realize we didn't know where to stand (it was a very narrow vehicle and we and our giant backpacks stood in the middle, wreaking havoc for the entire duration of the trip) or how to pay (to date we don't even know if we stole that bus ride). After finally setting foot on the street – catching unknown smells, not really knowing where we were, disoriented by the many hours without sleep, and realizing how different everything looked… it felt magical. We reached the hostel four hours later than we were expected, and we had dinner in the only joint that seemed to be open that late, which turned out to be one of the best meals we had during our entire trip. But the absolute best was sleeping: to this day we dream of that night's sleep and we remember it as the best we ever had, both as a couple and in our individual lives. It's hard to tell if the bed was amazing or if we were just incredibly tired, but it all seemed to help.
And, needless to say, the following morning: waking up, getting out, seeing the city in broad daylight, finally understanding where we were.
Besides travelling, where do you find inspiration?
Everywhere. We never know for sure where we'll find it, but it comes from every place and it can be anything. Sometimes it's something we read, something we heard, something we've been told or we're talking about; sometimes it's the work of other designers, plain and simple. What's become clear to us is that our personal and professional experience plays an important role in our willingness to open up to external input. As younger designers we were more insecure than we are now; the more experiences we have, the more we realize that everything can be incorporated in our work in one way or another – and that design is more free than we first thought.
How do you get in the right mindset to work and create? Do you have any rituals?
We do have rituals, but they don't guarantee that we'll get in the right mindset. There's no question that, in the morning, before starting to work, we always go out to get coffee. This is a sacred ritual of Pol's that is, more often than not, shared by Judit.
Thank you so much, Pol & Judit!
SOUVENIRS is crowdfunding until June 6th, 2021. Click here to pre-order the book, alongside many other unique rewards.