Ideas to Images: A Creative Journey

[Music] [Javier Jaén] Good morning. How are you? Yeah. I'm very sleepy. Thank you for asking.

8 o'clock in Spain is very early.

Thanks a lot for the invitation. I'm very happy to be here. To be honest, I say that always but in this case, it's true.

Thank you, everyone in Adobe, for the invitation. Also, thank you for the technicians, big applause for them that everything is looking awesome and sounding very well.

Again, I'm very happy to be here. I also had the chance to travel with my brother for the first time since we were kids. He's somewhere here so that's also important sometimes.

And also, thank you to you. If we are looking at this blue dot and this one, it's everyone in the world. Being very, very, very, very optimistic, we are this yellow dot over there. So you are very, very special, and thank you, everyone. Thank you very much for coming. Almost everyone in the world didn't but you did.

Thank you. Thank you also to everyone who is following this live from many different countries. Hello from one in Turkey, in France, in Italy or wherever you are.

So again, you are very special so I cannot lie to you. I have to start the talk with something embarrassing but I think it's better if I told you.

I'm kind of a mess with calendars, and timings, and stuff like that and I thought, I have an interview tomorrow but it was actually today at this same time.

So a minute ago, I was on the phone there and we found out that solution. And if you allow me, can we make the interview and the talk at the same time? Yes? You saved my life. Thank you. [Music] - Hello? - Yes. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. I can hear you, but I cannot see you. - Okay? - Can you hear me? - Yes. - Yes. Yes. Here we are. Okay. How do you manage with the technology thing? Yeah, yeah, I know. Thank you so much for taking this interview and for your time. I know your schedule was quite busy today. No. Thank you for the invitation. Well, I wanted to start from the beginning. Let's travel in time. I wanted to ask you, how did all start? At least your career.

Okay. How everything started. I was born the same year that Joan Miró died, the year that Time Magazine chose The Computer as a Machine of the Year, which is weird nowadays, and also the same year that the A-Team was on TV for the very first time. I'm not sure what all that means but it's exactly like that. I'm coming from Barcelona which is somewhere here but not this Barcelona. It's actually this Barcelona. So I grew up in this context and not one around me have anything to do with visual arts at all. So as a kid, I dream of being a baker when I will grow up.

We could play seven differences but I know that you're thinking in one.

I can read your minds.

Well, life usually don't go as you imagine. And I haven't done many cakes, to be honest, but I've done other work and jobs so I could say proudly and especially in this context that graphic design saved my life. I've been student, a bad student. I repeat school twice, high school twice. I studied graphic design and fine arts. I worked in a supermarket.

I worked as a waiter as almost everyone in your career at some point. I worked preparing rooms in a hotel for meetings. I worked in a video rental store. Those things that exist before Netflix, you remember? Time ago. I was working there before the DVD so you can imagine. I work in a car factory. All true. I work as a group leader of Spanish teenagers in England on summers. I work in excursions with seniors. And for many years, I was working in a radio station since I was 12 till 23 or something like that. And that drive me to be DJing weddings.

So I play a lot of summer hits. I play La Macarena many times in my life.

I know the dance. We can do it after if you want to. And in the last years, I've been a graphic designer, illustrator, and I've been teaching too. So I was struggle to define myself but many times people ask me if I'm more a graphic designer or I'm more an illustrator and honestly, I don't care anymore. Those labels helps a lot to the others but not necessarily to myself. I'm more interested in a broad idea of communication but since it's polite to answer when people ask you. I did what you all do when you don't know something. I google it. So I google Javier Jaén illustrator, it's 20,900 results.

Graphic designer is 56,700 results. And top model, it's a-- Okay. Top model, it's saying 165 million results. Google is never wrong. So you can go home today and say you met a top model which is it's always good. Most of my work, it's actually related with what it's called conceptual illustration. But I always been particularly interested in the part of the work where I become a translator. I will tell you more about that later. [Music] And, Javier, tell me where, for example, in a social gathering with people who are familiar with your work at home. How would you describe what you do without going into too many technical details? Okay. That's always a tough one.

What I do, I think it's very similar to when you invite someone for dinner at home, so you choose the cutlery, the table clothes, the glasses, or the music to create an atmosphere depending if it's in a family meal, or a romantic evening, or a business dinner. So that will change. In my case, I choose shapes, images, typography, or sound to communicate those ideas in my work. Again, exactly the same way that we always do with those little things in life. And if I have to be completely honest with you, which is the idea for today, I've never been very reflexive with my own work. I think this is something that others do better than me. But a couple of years ago, I had the chance to work in that project that we're going to see now. [Music] I was invited by Counter-Print Books to put together a book about my work. By the way, you can find it here.

You thought that was a regular talk but that's an info commercial. Please close the doors. Working on the book was a little bit like going to therapy, when you start to see connections on things that you have done some years ago and you understand why you do things today. And again, being more aware of what the work you do, it means for you and it means for others and how was your path during those years? I've been lucky enough to work in many different topics through these years. The last years, I've worked for environment, technology, law of sex, diversity, literature, science, gastronomy, a lot of works with social movements. You may know some of those. I've done a ton of editorial work for different clients. This was for The New York Times and True Crimes.

It was about politicians.

You say that in English, right? True? Yeah. I was very scared that this-- If you don't have this expression, this will be a very strange image.

Next one was on fake news.

Look at this arm.

Okay.

No more commentary here.

Book covers.

I also work in other fields like advertising, fashion. I work with music, doing album covers and a lot of personal projects that I'll show you also today. In the book or in the talk, I will not be teaching you how to do things because I, honestly, I don't really know. I will share how I've done them and why they work or why they were a completely disaster. We'll see some of behind the scenes. This poster for the anniversary of Twin Peaks.

And in terms of style for me, this idea of sticking to one graphic style always have felt claustrophobic in my case. So I prefer to use different techniques or graphic approaches that fits each project at best at least. That's what I try.

In this case, it was for the New York Times on this cover on gun control and its cost here in the US. I worked with stripes of paper.

Here, this cover for Vanity Fair on mental health, the solution was write a simple line. Sorry.

Or here, I was using cigarettes in this friendly remainder.

In a case like that, it was for a film festival in Spain in Almería where they used to record most of the western movies.

In this case, I worked with a 3D model and everything was completely digital, but sometimes I also work with a more analog approach. Next one, it's 100% analog collage, which is here.

All real. So I try to make ideas the core of my projects. They are not always good ideas but I promise I do my best every day. Much of what I do is like the idea of the sculpture or the gardener so removing everything unnecessary until you find the essence. Next project talks a little bit about that. [Music] It's David from the Block.

I saw yesterday that she lived pretty close here. Never mind.

Surprising. This is based, of course, in the story of Michelangelo that suggests that he saw the figure on the marble and his task was to free it.

And this illustrates for me the idea of the creative process that we will talk about that later, and it was developed for a festival in Menorca in Spain called Pedra Viva. [Music] - Sorry. - Yeah. No problem. No, I would like to know now, what's your daily work routine like? And, of course, the question I always ask, what's your creative process? Okay. I've been working on an infographic. That's for you. It will be something like that. Yeah. Okay. Right now, we are a very small team in the studio. We are three people. It's Mai, Victoria, and me, plus some occasional collaborators. And this is how we organize our day. As you can see, I don't wake up very early but I end up going home later than it says here. I try to don't work on the weekends anymore, but in this infographic, the white part would be the part of the management. All the emails, messages, calls, video calls, meeting invoices, prepare the shop orders, and reminding people to pay us, sometimes they sadly forget. The green part will be the production part where all the productivity, let's say, it happens, all the ideas are generated and the projects come to life. It may be an illustration. It may be a design, a drawing, a photography, or whatever the project may need. And you will be wondering what's the pink part which is, of course, the distraction where everything leave-- I don't know about you but lately, I have a lot of problems to concentrate and everything, it's popping and calling me. The other day, I spent three hours seeing videos of people cleaning carpets. Why? I'm not particularly interested in that but I was there. So I try to think if I'm optimistic that all those distractions may affect also positively on the work in the same way that when we go for a walk, you see a face here or the shadow of this tree looks like a lady and you take a picture like, all those things are starting ideas, but that's just an excuse and distracting way too much. And next year, the mortadella should look more like that. We'll see. So the creative process, when we start thinking on that, the truth is that, I think, I don't follow necessarily always one way. There's a bunch of ways to go from A to B, from the problem to the solution or as the title of this talk, from the idea to the image. Sometimes we're just lost and insecure. Sometimes we are more strategic. Sometimes we are so obsessed that nothing come out at all. That happens as well. Those nights that you cannot sleep, your stomach hurts, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think it's important that we say that also in stage. Then we can hug each other. It's a group therapy.

And sometimes you are really lucky and things happen with not knowing very much how that happened. But thinking about this idea of the creative process, I always picture it as one of those adventure movies that a lot of bad things happen to you and you don't know how at the end of the movie, the guy or the girl didn't die. They succeed. And yesterday night, I was in the hotel preparing the talk and I found out that there's actually a movie talking about that and it's called Indiana Jones and the Creative Process. And for the very first time in Miami, we're going to see a little bit. [Music] Thank you.

Thank you very much. Okay, let's continue.

As I mentioned, I often work as a translator and most of the times, I have to translate complex idea into simple images. It could be an article of a newspaper to translate it again in an editorial illustration or it could be a song to do a number of cover, or it could be even a tomato sauce to make the label or the packaging depending if the sausage spicy, we'll choose different colors, different typographies, even the texture of the paper or the size of the box, so again, translating all of those things in images. Let's see with an example. Imagine I have to work with something as beautiful and difficult as love. Now it's your time to participate. What's your name? Felipe? Felipe. How would you represent love with a simple image that we all understand? Say it loud. With a heart and that is correct.

Good, Felipe.

But what's your name? Sorry. Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Felipe, we've seen this many, many, many times. And actually, love, the love is always struggling and feeling the pain and the passion. And love, it's way more similar to this. And your name is? Bea. Bea is, "Come on, we are in a design festival. When do you do something more designy?" And all of them are fine.

But we are only changing how they look. The concept is still exactly the same. We say something in Spanish that I'm not sure is going to be translating right in English but we say that even if you dress a monkey in silk, it's still a monkey.

You understand the idea? How do you say that in English? Never mind. We can do that later.

But I'm interested because the monkey in silk, forget about it.

So again, you are changing how things look but not the bones, what is actually the concept. And those solutions are very effective but also usually not very interesting and definitely not accurate. A light bulb to talk about an idea, or stairs to talk about improvement, or a puzzle piece for almost everything. Yes. It's never too good, never too bad but they cannot do the work. I try to approach projects from here in an understandable way and hopefully stimulating. It could be graphically or conceptually, ideally, both. This little enigma that the reader, the consumer or however you want to call it will understand and establish a connection with it, that word that is important in my work, it is this idea of complexity.

If we go a step further and in the previous example, we use insects to talk about love and we have these two ants kissing each other, we are making things very difficult to understand for the person who see this image for the very first time. Often as visual communicators, we go a step too far and we make things too difficult to understand for the readers of their image. I like a quote from an American designer called Frank Chimero that says that, "People ignore design that ignores people." People ignore design that ignores people. I try to keep that on mind as much as I can. That being said, sometimes working with a secret code could work as well. It generates, again, a lot of complexity. A lot of people ask me, "Why this image is called hat?" But you know what? Why? Right? Never mind.

[Music] Thank you very much for sharing me this. Honestly, what you told us, it's very interesting to me. I've been reading all about it in your fantastic book. Would you mind showing us now how all this is put in practice with some real examples? Sure. I think it's a great idea. Thank you. Let's start with this. This was a very important project for me and it all started with this very raw sketch. About seven years ago, I was asked to work in the new image of the Spanish drama theater. You probably have something here. And for the communication, they wanted to be as far as possible of the stereotypical images of theater, the Greek masks, the skull, the hand. So we began thinking on what actually theater really means. That's something I work like that many times, if I know nothing about the topic, which sometimes is exactly like that, so if we have accepted that everything around us is this thing called reality then in fiction, things don't necessarily work with the same laws. In fiction, we can travel through time, we can give life to objects, we can come back from death, we can even sing because we are very sad which in real life, I don't know about you, never happened to me. So we thought that the communication of the session for the theater should represent this, telling lies to describe truth.

So what I'm going to show you is the first poster of the season.

Even it's in Spanish but I guess you can understand what it's saying. It's lost fish. And we filled Madrid with this poster. We did like thousands of those and, in fact, for me, that's not a poster, that's a very low cost theater play. While you are in the street walking, there's a question in the wall, a surprise, a smile, a doubt. It makes you stop, look it around, share it with the person next to you, or maybe take a picture and there's even a phone number that when you call, there was a voice mail with 30 seconds of applause, and then a voice told you like a new season of theater started right with you, right in this moment and it takes you to a website where you can see the whole list of theater plays. And we end up doing a video for that. That it was an opening credits for a movie we're going to see today.

[Music] Thank you.

Thank you. During 3 seasons, we end up designing like 100 posters.

They told me like, "Okay, the fish, but remember you have to do the posters also." So for this, we create a graphic identity that was working currently with all the center productions but also that each poster on its own make sense. And you may think, to work on a project like that, completely freedom, it's your friend, but it's not. In my case, I only have four simple rules. It was using a single typography. It's Atlas by commercial type. It was flexibility in the composition depending on the length of the word or the image. It could be bigger or smaller on the top and middle.

The color as an expressive element and the object as a symbolic element as well. For the first season, we end up doing also animations of all the posters. And I could talk about the posters a lot, but at the end, someone always asked me like, "And the fish? Where's he or she?" How we end up?" And it's fine. He end up in the facade of the theater. It's the biggest sticker I've ever done. And it became an Instagram star as well, and a meeting point in Madrid.

Next project I'm going to show you is one of those projects that you want to make them as good and you are so into it that nothing works and nothing happened. And it works and your stomach hurts. It was in 2019. The Barcelona City Council commissioned me to design the communication of the Barcelona Poetry Festival. And I was trying to be as away as possible, those clichés images of poetry the feeder, the cloud, the dried flowers, the clogs, chess pieces, so I was trying to find this poetry in places where it didn't belong. I even proposed to use Lionel Messi as the image of the poetry festival that, of course, it didn't work. He was in Barcelona at the time. So that's what we end up doing.

[Music] I work with contrast. In this case, talk about poetry was good for the most aseptic place, this kind of medical images. And for me, poetry don't necessarily need to be synonymous of this idealized beauty. In the same way, we don't only paint flowers and blue skies. We can enjoy non-harmonic sounds or bitter flavors. I wanted to represent poetry as a synonym of an emotion, whatever the emotion.

It was everywhere in Barcelona and it's very exciting to see things on the street. I don't work a lot in Barcelona. It was everywhere. Even when I arrived home, it was there too.

One thing takes you to another and from the theater and from this festival, I end up working a lot with this museum in Barcelona. It's a Centre of Contemporary Culture. It could be easily one of our most important museums. I work in the communication of some exhibitions and you know that even they ask you today, a poster is never a poster anymore. It's content for social media. It will end up being things for merchandising, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the first one I want to show you, it was an exhibition about Mars and the fascination we have for this planet.

[Music] Yeah. So that was a spot for TV and, of course, the poster in these free mock ups that we'll use somewhere. And this is how it looks in the street, which is a little bit different, in the building or when schools came or for the bags. And next one, I'm so happy that we didn't do it, finally.

It was 2021 and we all were doing those things and it looks like The Joker but way more scary so at the end, the astronaut was exhausted. Poor astronaut.

More exhibitions I've done with them. This one was in about quantum physics and how different realities could live in the same place.

This was about the diffuse limits between plants and animals. This weird collection of octopus and calamari, you say it in English? And we end up doing the whole family.

Also, this one about the future-- No, sorry, the brain and celebrating the brain and its power. You will see this in Catalan in English and in Spanish. We do there everything in the three languages. And the last exhibition I worked with them, it's about the elephant in the room, this AI. So they asked me to work in the communication of a show, an exhibition about AI that was a year and a half ago, almost two years, which feels like 10 years ago in this field. And I always try to be as current as possible in the process. So I thought it may be a good idea to ask ChatGPT for ideas to do the poster.

It was the first time I was working on this tools and I don't know if you have been playing around but at that moment, everything felt to me like a casino where you end up winning but you have to play 100 times. So at the end you have the right solution but you have to work a lot on, it's probabilities of probabilities. And that remind me this philosophical idea of the theorem of the infinite monkey. You may hear about it. It's this idea that if you live in a room, a monkey with a typewriter for infinite time. He will end up writing Hamlet. In Spain, we say el quijote, but it's the same idea. So it took me a lot to arrive to this concept but making the image was not that complicated. So in that case, I end up using Adobe Firefly for this. I had a lot of doubts ethically and legally at that moment on using this kind of solutions, again, was the first time I was working with those tools. Even I'm not completely sure if we can call AI a tool. It may be something else too.

So we did this poster and, again, the hard part was to arriving to the concept. But generating the image, it was a click. So we did another one for the English version and another one for the Spanish version and that was fun. So let's do a collection of postcards with a bunch of versions and lot of them. I end up being a casting director here.

[Music] Thank you.

Next project I want to show, it's easily one of those projects that changed many things in your life, even personally. Three summers ago, I was about going holidays and I received a phone call from a production company in Spain called El Deseo. You may heard about them.

They asked me if I want to make the poster of the new movie of a guy called Pedro Almodóvar. That sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And you pretend that's normal? Yeah, of course. Your legs are shaking. And they say that I had to go to Madrid the day after-- Sorry, to see the movie with him, which again, you pretend it's normal. And remember what I told you with this idea of translator? So how you see a movie when you are making a poster? With a paper and with a pen, trying to take notes of everything that you can translate into an image. It could be a song. It could be a part of a dialect. It could be the wallpaper. It could be a cloth. Wherever that encapsulates the soul of the movie, even if it's a comedy, or a tragedy, or the tone, when you are in front of a cinema, it's like, this looks very good but maybe for another day because it looks boring also.

These things that have it translated into image, so I took a lot of drawings and little things while seeing the movie, then the lights come up and you don't understand anything which is good because at the end, you have a general feeling and they tell me, "Okay, great. Now you have a week to make the poster." And I'm going to show you something that usually I don't show but I thought it was a good excuse. This is part of my process. Not necessarily the proposals I've sent to the client but definitely, the image I share with colleagues, with my friends, with family, with people that are not involved in graphic design at all, which I think it's very important also to listen, then maybe you don't use exactly the comments but I think it's important to be aware. And everyone was telling me, "One of these posters was good, but I shouldn't present that one because it may be problematic." And he's like, "But which one?" I seriously see no problem on any of those so I think self-censorship is a very dangerous thing and that's not a joke. That's very, very, very important. So again, I was trying just to find the poster that represents the movie I saw. I presented the team and it was the same answer, one of these may be delicate.

But in this case, Pedro Almodóvar was pushing it so far and so artistically, current-- Sorry, I don't find the words. But he was so convinced that one of these was the one that represents the movie properly that wind up with one of those and some things happened.

[SPEAKING IN SPANISH] Thank you.

I could do a talk only about this poster because as you can imagine, it was a lot. It was a lot. And again, thanks to his artistic integrity, that was possible and I'm very happy that this poster is not only to promote a movie, it end up helping to denounce what I believe is a form of violence against women and that's not acceptable today so happy to contribute on that. Thank you.

I thought they will never call again and I end up doing his biography.

Last project I want to show you today, it's different to the ones I've been telling you. Again, this idea of translator doesn't helps here. In 2016, I received a call, private number. It's like, "Hello, Javier?" "Yes, yes, yes, it's me." "I have a project that you will not be able to refuse." It's like, "Tell me and maybe I say no." I have trouble saying no. Proof of that is that I'm here today.

Never mind. They asked me if I want to make a Fire in Valencia. Probably, you have no idea what this is. For those who don't know what it is, Fire in Valencia, it's a huge festival. During that week, they build around 300 sculptures of wood and paper and these kinds of materials and originally they were political, or critical, or connected with the news and humoristic. Everything looks like this. [Music] Intent, right? After a week in the street and lot of traditional activities and very long nights, they're burning in the streets. [Music] Wow. So they asked me if I want to make one of those Fires and, to be honest, even I highly respect their tradition, I felt it was far from my universe and I was not completely sure, 100% sure if I want to make a fire. And for a couple of weeks, I was thinking on that, if that makes sense or not. But something that I do many times is try to change the question. So the question was here not, "Do you want to make a fire?" The question was, "What do you want to burn?" And that's way more sweet.

And I have an answer. Not everything.

At that moment, I was working on this personal project about the difference between these two images, this one and this one, which is this so stupid human thing to define and label everything we know from here to here line. It's United States, Mexico, or North Korea, South Korea, or friends or lovers, no, no, wait. That's way more difficult, sorry.

Sadly, we have enough examples in the news that I-- There's no need to mention of what those imaginary lines are generating all over the world or many of those boundaries exist only in our minds. I end up saying yes. And with everything I told you and a couple of things more, we did a Fire in Valencia, and we finish with that.

[Music] Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Wow. Interesting stuff. This has been one of the best interviews I had. The pleasure from the beginning at all. Thank you. The clarity, the passion, the knowledge. I stop it. Shared with us today have been absolutely exceptional. I want to wish you the best. Please take care and thank you very much. Thank you to you. Thank you, everyone. You've been great. Thank you.

Big pleasure. Thank you very much.

[Music]