The man who designed Spain. At the age of eighty-nine, José María Cruz Novillo, author of some of the most seen -and least looked at- signs of contemporary Spanish life, has died. His work, omnipresent and almost invisible, raises an uncomfortable question about what it means, in reality, to design a country. There is an exercise that should be done at least once in a lifetime, and that now, with the news of his death, suddenly acquires a melancholic urgency. It consists of going out into the street -any street in any Spanish city- and look. To really look. The yellow mailbox on the corner, with its bugle synthesized to the point of abstraction. The gas station at the end of the avenue, whose logo looks like a flame, a flower or a flag, depending on whether you get closer or further away. The sign at the police station. The masthead of the newspaper left on the bar counter. The thousand peseta bill with the face of Galdós that someone keeps, almost like a relic, in a drawer. Almost all of this was drawn by the same man. And almost nobody knew it.
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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
