As part of FIDO contents, we’re gathering here some women designers to talk about some of their works. This section focus on case-studies aims to focus on the method and the strategy to approach a design project, presenting specifically the ideas that stand behind it and the step-by-step process.
Cristina Daura (1988, Barcelona) studied illustration at La Massana school to later complete her studies at the Maryland Institute Collage of Art (Baltimore, US). Now she works full time as an illustrator with clients such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zenit, Süddeutsche Magazine, El País, Penguin Books, Blackie Books, Planeta, Nike, Moog, Razzmatazz, Gutter Fest, Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Domino Records, Primavera Sound, etc. Her work, which has been showcased in multiple cities around Europe, Latin America and the USA, has a unique style with a childish and somehow “perverse” esthetic. For this new chapter of Digging into Design, we’re going to in detail analyze the work that Cristina Daura made for Avaaz-The World in Action before the Spanish national elections in July 2023 and for Cuéntalo Festival to dig deeper into how creative processes can be when they are closely entangled with strong social compromise and when they happen in highly charged political campaign.
The way the campaign first came to her was through a friend of hers. She worked for Avaaz, an NGO that empowers people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. The two of them together with Cristina’s creative partner Jabi Rodríguez, always said that would be interesting to work together so when in July 2023 the elections were anticipated and the political landscape seemed a little bit dark, she asked Cristina if was available to actively get involved in the campaign. Not only doing graphic design and art direction, but also doing activism “And of course I said yes”, Daura states. Surely one of the most complicated things of this project was the political importance that it could and would have. “First because you position yourself and expose yourself a lot. And because working for an NGO that has such a clear line of action is a lot of compromise, but I was comfortable with that” Cristina says. She explains also that she had to deal with situations she never had to deal with before as a designer: “Actually, the first idea for the campaign was to wallpaper the streets but after some legal research, Avaaz realized that was not possible. During the time of an active political campaign, if you are not an official party, you can not put political ballots in the streets. We got to know that two days before we started printing the whole thing!”
It was right after when the idea of the sailcloth came up: “There was this sailcloth that VOX —the radical right political party in Spain—had put that said “decide what’s important to you” where some feminist, LGTBIQ+ and other progressive identity symbols were thrown away to the rubbish, so we thought that what our idea was the best way in dialoguing with that”
Precisely having a sailcloth was the other big challenge of this project. She affirms it was hard to adapt the dimensiones in such a short notice. “And the dimensions that we had prepared for this new action were absolutely huge” she laughs. “I was worried about the technical part. I was afraid that the final result, once printed, was not like the one I wanted. The action was big and you only have one sailcloth, so there is like one only chance. But I am really happy with the result, like technically everything went really well.”
Also, one of the most interesting sides of this case was how a work like this could have been intimidating for Cristina as, for days, it was all over the national media. She affirms more than intimidating it was “overwhelming” as “a lot of “famous” people started sharing the image in social media. “My brother is Rigoberta Bandini’s husband best friend and she shared the image in social media. Then the ball became really big. I think there is no other post I have published that has as many likes, shares and comments as this one” she affirms. Also she fully understood how social media operates –politically and in terms of democratizing the conversation–: in the beginning she thought it was positive to let people dialogue as “that is always better than having one single and absolutely homogenized opinion”. Nevertheless, after a couple of days, Cristina says how it was incredible how a lot of comments were people fighting each other, which led her to close the “comment option”. Also, after the campaign was released, VOX sued the NGO because of defamation. They wanted the image to be withdrawn but it generated the totally opposite phenomenon because everyone talked about the sailcloth again and also associated the lawsuit with a dictatorship approach to freedom of speech.
But this is not the only job Cristina has done that shows how she socially and creatively gets involved and committed. It was at Cuéntalo Festival 2023 after some previous work with Ayuntamiento de Logroño, one of the major cities in the north of Spain.
A pity that this new chapter of Digging into Business has now come to an end. We want to thank Cristina very much for the amazingly interesting conversation we had as we very much admire the way she brings her social commitment to all the artistic work she does. See you in the next episode with another exceptional guest.
*** All the images are property of ©CristinaDaura, you’ll need her explicit permission to reproduce them
