ALEJANDRO MOLESTINA
NEW YORK, USA
01. What is one tool or effect that is essential to your design process?
I mean, we could go very broad with it and say the act of play, which is just not taking things so seriously when you're doing them and trying to have a mindset that doesn’t take yourself too seriously or anything. Trying to get back into that childlike curiosity mode of discovery - through action that doesn't necessarily need to be super premeditated or thoughtful, it can be more instinctual.
But if we go smaller scale with it, a tool that I think is essential to my design process would have to be solarizing things and then playing with the contrast. The reason I enjoy that tool specifically is because when I was taking darkroom classes, I learned how to do that physically and it's a cool thing where you can flip the highlights and the lowlights of an image to be the opposite. In Photoshop you can control that to make things have contrast and relationships visually with each other that you maybe wouldn't have thought of before. It feels like an interesting balance that you have less control over, but that you can manipulate and play with.
But if we go smaller scale with it, a tool that I think is essential to my design process would have to be solarizing things and then playing with the contrast. The reason I enjoy that tool specifically is because when I was taking darkroom classes, I learned how to do that physically and it's a cool thing where you can flip the highlights and the lowlights of an image to be the opposite. In Photoshop you can control that to make things have contrast and relationships visually with each other that you maybe wouldn't have thought of before. It feels like an interesting balance that you have less control over, but that you can manipulate and play with.
02. What’s your primary way of collecting found graphics, i.e. the internet, the street, vintage books,
magazine?
magazine?
I would say it's mainly the Internet. I love Are.na, because you get the privilege of looking through people’s collections of found stuff. It's also public so you can sort of adapt it in your own way. I have also been using the Internet Archive online which is really cool.
They have so many scanned books from the nineteen hundreds, early and late eighteen hundreds, which is crazy, designs of ornamentation or script typefaces or really interesting, insignias and stuff that you can screenshot and scan to use for your own purposes because it's public access. So those are the two places I would really go.
This project has made me think about walking on the street and really being observant of the things that are happening around you and the graphics. I feel like I do take notice, but I don't always pull out my phone to capture the things I'm seeing that have caught my attention. So I think I want to get better at that because I feel like that's sort of a more authentic way of resourcing found graphics and it's through your own exploration physically.
They have so many scanned books from the nineteen hundreds, early and late eighteen hundreds, which is crazy, designs of ornamentation or script typefaces or really interesting, insignias and stuff that you can screenshot and scan to use for your own purposes because it's public access. So those are the two places I would really go.
This project has made me think about walking on the street and really being observant of the things that are happening around you and the graphics. I feel like I do take notice, but I don't always pull out my phone to capture the things I'm seeing that have caught my attention. So I think I want to get better at that because I feel like that's sort of a more authentic way of resourcing found graphics and it's through your own exploration physically.
03. What are your thoughts on reappropriating graphics, and what role does found imagery/graphics play in your design process?
This is a thing that I think I formulated an opinion of at RISD and have been challenged on many times at where I work now, where I don't really believe that anything is actually truly original in this day and age, especially when it comes to painting or graphic design or sculpture.
Everything is referential. Almost anything that you make, even if you sit down and are just drawing with pen and paper, there's someone or something out there in the world that has made something that looks or feels similar to what you've done. I think the concept of originality is really overrated and not important in a way. Every bias you have is from an interaction or experience that you've already had that is in your brain, in your psyche, affecting the way you think and visualize things. I feel personally that it’s more powerful and interesting to run at that and accept it with open arms and not give a fuck about what is the most inherently yours versus someone else's.
I think when it comes to creation in that way there's obviously copywriting and standards and respect, but it shouldn't be that deep. You know? I think it's just more about how can we all collectively continue making stuff. And I think it's cool if we bounce off each other and we borrow and learn from things that didn't necessarily come directly out of our frontal lobe.
Everything is referential. Almost anything that you make, even if you sit down and are just drawing with pen and paper, there's someone or something out there in the world that has made something that looks or feels similar to what you've done. I think the concept of originality is really overrated and not important in a way. Every bias you have is from an interaction or experience that you've already had that is in your brain, in your psyche, affecting the way you think and visualize things. I feel personally that it’s more powerful and interesting to run at that and accept it with open arms and not give a fuck about what is the most inherently yours versus someone else's.
I think when it comes to creation in that way there's obviously copywriting and standards and respect, but it shouldn't be that deep. You know? I think it's just more about how can we all collectively continue making stuff. And I think it's cool if we bounce off each other and we borrow and learn from things that didn't necessarily come directly out of our frontal lobe.
04. Do you ever recycle your own graphics or elements of them? Or is a graphic dead to you as soon as it’s out in the world?
I work a job where I have to make so many versions of things in the first two weeks of a project and I think a lot of them end up being really cool. Then on the third week, it usually ends up that the most boring one is chosen by the clients or it gets distilled down to something that's very familiar, commercial and acceptable, losing all of the things that I thought made it successful to begin with.
I haven't been doing as much recently but especially in the beginning of my job, I used to recycle graphics and compositions constantly that I had made. I just had a really hard time thinking; here’s something that I'm really proud of and love and I made for McDonald's, but they’re never gonna use it because it's just not the vibe of the final product that we’re putting out, which is totally acceptable and understandable, that's the job. That's the tea. But, yeah, I used to do that all the time.
For the final series of posters that I did as a part of my thesis, I went back into compositions that I had made over COVID, and I used so many of them to help inform decisions because it felt like I was doing this sort of communication between my older and younger self, trying to synthesize these different thoughts and emotions into something that made sense for the current day. I think I do that a fair amount actually. I just haven't recently because I haven't been making my own stuff.
But I think as a graphic designer some of the best resources we can have is a hard drive where we have all of those things saved where we can go back in and rediscover and reuse and re-contextualize. I would encourage anyone who is starting out to do that and to keep all their old work so that they can look back and use it. You might think something is shit, but then three years later, you're looking at it again, and it might spark something in you that makes you wanna use it differently or improve on it.
I haven't been doing as much recently but especially in the beginning of my job, I used to recycle graphics and compositions constantly that I had made. I just had a really hard time thinking; here’s something that I'm really proud of and love and I made for McDonald's, but they’re never gonna use it because it's just not the vibe of the final product that we’re putting out, which is totally acceptable and understandable, that's the job. That's the tea. But, yeah, I used to do that all the time.
For the final series of posters that I did as a part of my thesis, I went back into compositions that I had made over COVID, and I used so many of them to help inform decisions because it felt like I was doing this sort of communication between my older and younger self, trying to synthesize these different thoughts and emotions into something that made sense for the current day. I think I do that a fair amount actually. I just haven't recently because I haven't been making my own stuff.
But I think as a graphic designer some of the best resources we can have is a hard drive where we have all of those things saved where we can go back in and rediscover and reuse and re-contextualize. I would encourage anyone who is starting out to do that and to keep all their old work so that they can look back and use it. You might think something is shit, but then three years later, you're looking at it again, and it might spark something in you that makes you wanna use it differently or improve on it.
05. What’s the last image in your camera roll of something interesting or unusual you saw on the street?
I was on a walk the other day and I walked past this construction site, and it felt very surreal. It just had overgrown into all these plants and stuff. It was really pretty. The pictures really don’t do it justice, all these flowers and weeds just growing in this active construction site.