Alune Stories: Luísa Guarnieri

1) What’s something that you think defines you well to someone who doesn’t know you? It could be a characteristic, a hobby, or an interest.

Definitely wanting to do everything by hand, having way too many hobbies and being very nostalgic!

I'm always excited with the thought that virtually anything can be done using our very own hands, and this applies for both my style as a designer and to my personal life.

I'm always trying and experimenting new hobbies, from beading to ceramics, from sewing . Currently, I've been obsessed with filet crochet, which allows you to draw anything using crochet squares. I think it is so crazy that you can draw anything just by using squares and I'm really interested in experimenting the way this idea intersects with textiles and other materials.

Also, I think ever since I was a teenager I was recognized as a nostalgic person, even with eras I didn't actually get to experience. I became obsessed with 80s movies and music when I was in middle school and actually never looked back. Nowadays, I expanded my nostalgia-ness to other eras, as now I also love researching, listening and learning things about the 70s, 90s and the most recent nostalgia of the early 2000s (finally, an era that I actually got to experience). I pride myself in having a really good memory (or at least that's what my childhood friends say!) and I love digging out some obscure memories, and I feel that I use my work as a way to bring light to things that people didn't even know they remembered, but they were there hiding in a corner of their brain.

2) Can you tell us a bit about your career in design?

Originally, I wasn't headed towards a design career at all. In fact, it wasn't even something I considered until my final year of college, when I was majoring in Communication with a minor in Film.

Throughout college, we were constantly creating design materials to support the student films we produced. I was designing posters, pitch decks, props, and promotional assets for our short films and I gradually realized that I felt far more fulfilled working on those visual elements than on the films themselves. That's when I first began to seriously consider changing career paths.

In 2021, I had just graduated college and was definite in my decision of pursuing  graphic design as a career. At that time, online design courses became a turning point for me, as they allowed me to build a strong foundation, gain confidence in my skills, and begin developing a portfolio while applying for my first design roles.

I started out working in-house for agencies, companies and design studios, where I was able to learn a lot about how the industry works, how to conduct meetings, research, deliverables. In 2024, after 2 years working at a design studio as a senior designer, I was feeling confident enough to make the move to freelancer. 

Freelancing made me learn a lot and also develop my personal style, but I feel that I'm still learning, day-by-day, and each day getting a better understanding of what I want for my work. Being able to learn, experiment and reinvent yourself throughout your career is what is currently exciting me the most about working as a freelance designer.

3) How would you define design? What does it mean to you?

In a broad sense, I would define design as a way to communicate and tell stories through visual mediums. 

I've always been drawn to storytelling, from writing stories just for fun when I was a teen through going to college wanting to be a screenwriter. I now see design as the medium I found to keep telling those stories and creating immersive worlds, but in a way that brings together many of the skills and interests I have. 

Design also allows me to experience the eras I'm nostalgic for, even if I never got to live through them. I can create an '80s-inspired design using analog techniques that recreate the way designers worked at the time, allowing me to engage with that visual language in a hands-on way.

Finally, I love how broad the field of design is. The possibility of working on projects across so many different mediums and industries is incredibly exciting to me, whether that's designing album covers, magazine spreads, packaging, T-shirt graphics, posters, books, or something entirely different.

4) Is there a project in your portfolio that you particularly enjoyed working on and would like to share with us?

One of my favorite projects is the editorial illustration I did for CAPRICHO magazine, a brazilian mag that has been a staple for teens ever since the 1950s. They had gone out of print in 2015 but, in December 2024, they returned to do their iconic printed issues.

I had the pleasure to be invited to work on a piece that would open the issue, right next to the editor's letter. The idea for the piece was to represent the magazine's manifesto: “Manifest. Disobey. Be yourself”. I had a lot of creative freedom, so I decided to explore a very handmade collage aesthetic: I wanted to create letters using playdough, imitating the visual of cut out magazine lettering and, since I collected vintage issues from CAPRICHO, I decided to look back on the magazine's vast history and use pages and elements from the old issues to build my collage.

It was a huge full circle moment for me: I was an avid reader for the magazine when I was a teenager back in the 2010s, with an active subscription and everything. The younger me who was using pages from that magazine as posters could never even imagine that I would be able to work for them! I think this was one of the moments where I just knew that I was on the right path, that I had made the right choice in changing careers and that I was able to achieve my goals.

I also adore how the final illustration turned out and I feel that it is a project that accurately represents my style and everything that I love to create.

5) Could you share a reference, an inspiration, or something you really admire in your field?

I love vintage graphic design and the aesthetics from the 70s, 80s and 90s are a huge inspiration for all of my work. To find unique and genuine vintage references, I became an avid archive researcher, and I especially love to find references in unexpected things, like paper ephemera. “Ephemera” is a term used for things that aren't supposed to last: think train tickets, movie ticket stubs, fruit stickers, baggage tags. Letterform Archive has a lot of articles and ephemera in their collection. I think they're a perfect way to research past aesthetics without getting limited to stereotypes. I'm also always searching on the Internet Archive or Flickr to find ephemera and other unique vintage inspiration.

As I said, I love getting inspired by really unexpected stuff, and, as of now, I've been getting a lot of inspiration from the style of illustration from CD-Rom games from the 90s and 2000s. I've been obsessed with the aesthetic from childhood games like Allie's Playhouse and Reader Rabbit, and I've been trying to explore this style in some of my newer illustrations.

Also, I love this account on Instagram, which curates and shares letterings from magazines, album covers and books from the 20th century, with most of them being from the 70s and 80s. I love how they remove the lettering from their original context, making us pay attention to the typography only.  

6) As a former student at the school, could you share a bit about your experience and what you enjoyed most?

I was able to attend two outstanding Aprender Design courses: Art Direction 101, with Du Nieto, and Building Your Creative Identity, with Zuzanna Rogatty. Both came in moments of my career where I was feeling that I needed a different outlook and to be out of my comfort zone.

In Art Direction 101, it really struck me how we were able to make connections and network with the class even though the classes were online. It was so interesting to be prompted to work in groups and build together a visual identity to a real client. It was the first time I was able to do a group project in a design class, where I was learning and getting inspired not only with the teacher but also with my peers. The same thing happened in Building Your Creative Identity, where I was also able to connect with people from all over the world. Since the class invited us to talk about our inspirations and to bring references, it was so interesting to see what moved each of my classmates and get inspired with their references as well.

Also, I loved how both courses were extremely hands-on. I'll never forget one of the first activities in Art Direction 101: creating a “moodboard” for ourselves, only using analog techniques. To this day, I still use this moodboard that I created in class every time I need to introduce myself in a presentation.

All the hands-on projects made me way more involved in what we were learning, and it is so valuable to receive direct feedback from professionals that we really admire. In Zuzanna's class we were doing posters as our class project, and she would sketch and experiment with them to give us tips and food for thought. That kind of input was so thoughtful and would really push me forward to try out new things: the class would end and would leave so inspired that I would stay a couple more hours in front of the computer just to experiment with my poster. 

Follow Luísa on Instagram and visit her website.