Discover the interview of Ricardo Willson in Santiago de Chile, Chile
How did you become designer ?
I can say that I always had a fascination with design since I was very young. As a common dream for any child in the world I wanted to be a pilot, I really liked planes and everything related to them. I paid a lot of attention to colors, the livery designs, the uniforms and even how information was organized in those old boarding passes (the ones that were filled by hand!). I spent the most of my free time drawing planes, also painting them, and making my own designs. Then this fascination was passed to the design of the packaging of the cereal boxes, I liked very much to see them on the alleys in supermarkets along with other boxes and to see how this great colorful wall was formed in front of me, a wall full of colorful shapes and fonts. Then, as I grew up, I began to realize that graphic design was my thing, and being in high school I reached a decisive moment in my life, deciding if I would fulfill my childhood dream and be a pilot or study design graphic.
Today I do not regret having taken the second path, and one of my future plans is to unite this two passions and design an airline brand.
How would you define your vision of design, your style ?
For me, design should help people in every way, my vision of design is based on the effectiveness of messages and how these are received by people. Help effectively for communicate a solution, or deliver information about a product or service, organizing the information so that it can be better understood, or just deliver a message. Design is a powerful tool, and in the wrong hands it can be used in the wrong way. If we talking about branding or visual identities, for me is easy to define my style in that way.
I love pure geometric forms, the use of the lines and perfectly angular shapes, also using flat-solid colors. In that branch of design I like (in some way) to honor my cultural legacy, in which the use of simple forms was commonly used by the many native tribes of Latin America, either in ceremonial vessels, necklaces or simply as decorations. Also im a huge fan of the German/Swiss/Austrian graphic design style, starting with bauhaus and the work of Walter Gropius, then Reudi Bircher and Otl Aicher, with his magnificent work done for the 1972 Munich Olympics and previously the Lufthansa livery redesign. Also, I can’t forget to mention other design masters like Ivan Chermayeff, Saul Bass and Massimo Vignelli, who have been largely a source of inspiration for the work I do every day.
Having said that, “my visual communication approach puts the functional over the aesthetic, giving priority to the accuracy of the message”, as my bio reads.
For the future, what are your professional projects?
With all this global crisis, my immediate plan is to be able to close the current year in a good way. At the moment I am still working on a couple of personal projects and also working on some branding and packaging projects for some clients. I would like to specialize in packaging in the future (which is also a branch of design that I am very passionate about) and perhaps improve my knowledge of 3D tools, which today are of great help to our work.
In the future I have plans to form my own design office as a managing partner, and to be able to further internationalize my work.
What do you like the most in your job ?
Helping people to communicate through design is something that moves me and is the main purpose of what I do every day.
