Angello Torres’ packaging design incorporates colours and shapes from the “spirit world”

“A jupiterian writes me an email asking me for a poster to inaugurate the next supernova explosion […] in the brief they specify the material of the poster ‘aerographene’ and their jupiterian typography in TTF, previously I investigated that they have no problems with legibility so I can reduce the typography to the size of 1 nano pixel.” While this design brief might sound a little out of the ordinary to most creatives, to Angello Torres it’s an everyday thing. Often feeling unfulfilled by the mundane requirements of clients, the graphic designer has turned to inventing his own.

That being said, he’s also pretty skilled at weaving the otherworldly threads of his imagination into real-world projects. For instance, when designing the logo and packaging for alternative tea brand Carnaval, he turned to the “spirit world” for inspiration. Drawing psychedelic colour schemes and hazy shapes from this “portal”, the designer sought to transform the act of tea-drinking into “ritual from beginning to end”.

He also finds satisfaction in jobs that “require codifying music into graphic language”, he tells us. “Especially when the origin is linked to another culture.” In a project for HighLife, a music festival and multicultural platform based in Buenos Aires and Melbourne, he produced a logo and graphic system based on the visual legacies of “African ancestral” cultures. Combining these creative influences with minimalist typography, Angello worked to create a dynamic “container for the visual landscapes” of the platform.

Considering the imaginative way in which Angello interprets briefs, it is no surprise that his introduction to design was, as he puts it, “not linear”. Born in Peru and moving to Argentina as a child, the designer explains that “being a migrant always took away space to think about my future.” He didn’t get a real chance to begin experimenting until he was 23 and even then “without really knowing what it was all about”.

Since then he has developed an impressive range of digital skills that mimic analogue techniques like collage, impasto, frottage and scumbling. In his Peaches in Regalia poster, a project inspired by the multi-layered musical compositions of Frank Zappa, Angello uses collage, metaphors and ancient languages to bring to life “little worlds and civilisations” from his imagination. The central organic form of a peach is attended by a curious range of figures and symbols, which are “miniaturised in the style of hieroglyphics”.

Moving on from his recent success through freelance work, Angello would like to withdraw entirely from the design industry and focus his efforts on breaking “the established canons of design”. This has led him to a recent fascination with the world of NFTs: “I don’t mean the cryptocurrency market, but this new world where many rules about beauty in design and functionality have been broken.”