PLANTA BAIXA & CARDIOGRAMAS
Editorial Design, Inphography2016
This project profiles four design studios in Porto, Portugal, through interviews with their creative directors. Structured over two-day visits, it combines photographic documentation of each studio’s physical space, capturing its material and operational logic, with conversations exploring the values, processes, and emotions behind their work. The result is an editorial interpretation that bridges rational structure and expressive identity.
This project profiles four design studios based in Porto, Portugal, presenting interviews with their respective creative directors. The editorial work seeks to investigate the inherent potential of these spaces in shaping graphic expression.
The research is structured around distinct moments for each studio, each visited over a two-day period. On the first day, a photographic survey documents the physical structure of each studio, offering insight into their routines and daily operations. This stage, titled Blueprint, represents an attempt to map and understand the rational dimensions of each space.
The images capture walls, windows, furniture, computers, papers, and other elements that define the materiality of these environments.
Guided by technical principles such as scale and proportion, this visual approach informs the final layout of each booklet according to the buildings’ physical dimensions.
Although not strictly architectural, this representation functions both as a stylistic reference and as an interpretative reconstruction of the author’s memory, presenting a collection of impressions gathered during the visits.
On the second day, the focus shifts to meetings with designers and creative directors, exploring the values and emotions that underpin each studio’s practice. This stage, titled Cardiograms, draws an analogy to the monitoring of heart activity. Each booklet features an interview with the creative directors or founders, examining their perspectives, inspirations, references, narratives, and processes.
These conversations give voice to the spaces, representing the emotional core that drives their work. Excerpts from the recorded interviews are incorporated into the booklets as printed fragments, transformed into graphic elements that embody the abstraction of emotional expression within the studio environment.
