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Domestika Maestros: Enric Huguet
We got to know the human side of one of the design world’s most renowned pioneers, who defines the designer as a "poet of the world’s images".
Enric Huguet Muixí (Barcelona, 1928) is one of the fathers of graphic design and illustration in Spain. He made his name creating some of the most iconic posters of the 50s and 60s and designing brands and other commercial communication, most often in the pharmaceutical sector.
He was one of the founders of the ADG - FAD (Association of Graphic Designers of the Promotion of Arts and Design) and among his best-known works are designs such as the Gelocatil box, the Santiveri logo, the VOX dictionaries and the graphic style of ACESA, Spain’s highway authority.
Huguet defines himself as a former graphic designer and a meticulous perfectionist. In his work, he has never followed a pattern and has preferred not to allow his personality to get in the way of the message. As a result, diversity has always been his great ally.
To be a designer is to be a poet
Huguet defines the designer as "a linguist and a poet of the world’s images". He asserts that the most important thing for a creator is to know how to transmit the message and that it carries emotion and manages to reach people, something that he achieves through poetry, humor, and art.
Enric started working as a graphic designer around 1946, when the profession didn’t even have a name in Spain yet: practitioners were called commercial artists or advertising cartoonists. It was then that he discovered that cartoonists did far more than what their name suggests: they convey messages and, therefore, they are visual communicators.
Enric was Professor of Advertising at Massana, one of Spain’s most prestigious art schools, from 1963 to 1993. It was a job that he was passionate about. According to him, his most important task was for the students to feel excited about what they were studying, to feel that learning was something fun and always relevant.
You have to turn the problem into a game. If you do that right, students will engage. The school is not a building, it is not a faculty or a curriculum. It is, first and foremost, the students.
The teacher has to excite and inspire students, encouraging them to sacrifice and strive for what interests them, something that, as Huguet admits, he didn't always manage to do.
Design: an honest vocation
Beyond the theory and practice, which allows a designer to spot the best image or color for a job, Huguet emphasizes that the most important element will always be in the moral aspect of the trade, in the honesty it demands:
It is important that we instill in any individual in our society that it is important to be an honorable person, obedient to deontology, to their responsibilities, and for them to know how to respond, and be conscious of the responsibility they have.
At the age of 90, in his studio, he confesses that, for him, the most important thing in life is not in the work, but in the human. The designer testifies that there is no work more important than humanity itself because, above all, we are people and work is just a consequence of the things we do.
Domestika Masters brings the knowledge and experience of great figures from the creative world to our community.
If you want to deepen your knowledge of advertising design, check out Cruz Novillo and Pepe Cruz’s course, 2D and 3D Corporate Identity and if you would rather learn how to make posters, this course by Error! Design (Xavi Forné) on Illustrated Poster Design might be the one for you.
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