For Loren Garciot, designers are graphic translators of thought

When Loren Garciot was young she wanted to be the president of her home country, Spain. That ambition changed when she started to wonder who designed the logo on cans of Coke. Could you, she asked herself, make money from doing that? She soon discovered you could, and her passion for graphic design took flight.

Concepts have always acted as points of inspiration for Loren; she believes designers are “graphic translators of thought,” people who turn philosophy into image. That idea chimes with British veteran Ken Garland’s notion that, “the role of the designer is to be a communicator, to take in information and translate it into an easy to understand visual language”.

For Loren, design is about problem-solving. “I try to justify each step I take in every project”, she tells us. “Sometimes I get results that I like aesthetically, but which are hard to defend in meaning. So whenever that happens, I have to give it a lot of thought until it has some coherence, at least to me”. Loren recognises the responsibility that graphic designers carry with them. If they are the translators of thought, then they should make sure those are not harmful to humankind.

Now an art director at the Malpaso publishing house, she describes her style as varied; this is because every project given to her is unique, so she responds differently to each one. Loren prefers to work with customers, “they give you more freedom”, she comments. “Not like brands where you have to follow their look in a rigorous way”.

Each project starts with an empty slate. “I try to get all the information that I can on a specific matter”, Loren explains. “The more knowledge I have on the subject, the better I will understand the customer. I become an expert on every topic”. For her, it is essential that the customer gets involved in the creative process, so they can understand “the concept, defend their identity and know the enthusiasm that went behind every task”.

For her MA, she designed the publication Tribu y Tabú, a book written by self-created psychoanalyst Edip de Ludovic, aimed at criticising societal prejudices towards people with mental health issues. As Loren comments, “this criticism is expressed graphically from the first page to the last”. On the front cover “tribe” is repeated uniformly to represent “the norms imposed by society”, camouflaged within that is “taboo”. Flyleaves inside are “covered in blue velvet — an allusion to the couch where Ludovic analysed the protagonists of his work”. For Loren, behind every design decision, there is a reason; a reason that is then beautifully and coherently translated.