Bringing Opposites Together.
(an interview) with Sebastian Lahera

Text by Fermin Solana for New Braves, Translated by Ellie Robins

español

Argentinean Sebastián Lahera is a one-man powerhouse of diverse content, all distinguished by the same quality: timeless, refined taste. His portfolio includes graffiti art and illustrations for the New York Times. He’s a graphic designer, but that’s too small a pigeonhole for him: with his unique sensibility, he can create anything from a font that transports you to an unknown time to the most stunning and addictive pizzas in the Río de la Plata region (https://pony.pizza/)

Ultimately, Lahera’s role is that of constant curator of the mighty flood of virtuoso designs that flows from his own imagination. He’s a graphic poet. A wandering strategist. An inventor.

These days, he splits his time and talents between pure gastronomy and carving out a few minutes here and there to work at his desk—where he delivers gems such as Everything is Connected, his wonderful capsule collection for New Braves.

You’re a graphic designer by trade. When did you start exploring typographic design?

I think letters were always my starting point when I contemplated design projects. From there, I started learning about morphology, F&F (form and function), and other design storytelling tools.

How big a part of your everyday work life is this kind of design?

A huge one. I have this font called “Viceversa” that I’ve been working on for the past ten years—designing it, modifying it, making new adaptations, but I can’t seem to finish it. Like an expressionist painting, it’s always evolving. But I’ve used variations on that font to build the whole brand identity of my pizza business, Pony Pizza (using the bold font), the new capsule collection for New Braves (in regular), and some signage for the New York City restaurant Altro Paradiso (in light). I’m working on a few other fonts and I have some finished ones too, but this one seems to be the liveliest of them all.

You used to spend all day in front of your computer. Now that you sell pizzas all day instead, how do you carve out that precious time for creative work?

Something I read once gave me an epiphany, and I decided to incorporate it into my life: typography isn’t just the letters we see inside the margins of a page, it’s the way we interpret the blank spaces between the letters. Similarly, I can design without being at a computer. Whenever I’m kneading pizza dough, I’m thinking about some campaign, strategy, or long-sleeved shirt printed on the front, side, and sleeves. Then when I sit down at the computer, I devour Adobe.

The best part about not being at my computer all day is that it allows me to work with fewer reference points. For me, starting with a blank slate and limited resources is the basis of a winning design.

So what universe do you plunge into when you’re looking for references, then?

When it comes to typography, it’s really my parents’ library when I was a little kid that formed me. It was filled with books, magazines, and notes that brought together two very different worlds: poetry on my dad’s side and biology on my mom’s.

In my dad’s collection, I would find photocopied chapbooks—a little like fanzines from the 70s. There were also a lot of cultural magazines about art, society, and politics, like Mutantia and Crisis, and many books that really hit the spot and had a big influence on me, like work by Edgar Bayley and his brother Tomas Maldonado, all the way up to Arte Concreto Invención, which exposed me to Brazilian concrete poetry.

In my mom’s collection, I would find books 4 inches thick and bigger, filled with cryptic images of organisms, formulas, arthropods, and mitochondria, as well as landscaping and interior design encyclopedias inherited from my grandmother.

Tell us about your work for New Braves. What does the phrase Everything is Connected mean to you?

When Amalia and Uzi approached me to participate in their project, I dived right in. I knew that whatever happened, it would be a beautiful challenge. As soon as they told me the concept, everything took a turn for the biotic: moss and stone, straight lines and curves. That’s how I work: with opposites. Then my signature move is to let the color gradient take care of the letters’ body language, however it wants to. That’s what “Everything is Connected” means to me: bringing opposite together.

We had a back and forth, where I would propose images and they’d put forward excellent materials. It was a timeless, buoyant process, and we had a blast. By the time we found our way to the final piece, New Braves had evolved as a brand, and I had evolved too, but the core concept “Everything is Connected” stayed true and stronger than ever.

What do you feel connected to?

Number one: people’s gestures. If they laugh with their eyes, I’m theirs.

Number two: people’s hobbies. I have some friends whose dad is a deep-sea diver, and he never runs out of stories, photos, and exciting information.

Number three: wabi-sabi—when making things comes as naturally as breathing. Every breath you take is different, but they all do the job of getting oxygen into you.

Number four: food; the new life you find while fermenting food; being self-sufficient; vegetable gardens; seeds.

Number five: the number 5, because it’s made of a square and a circle—another example of opposites coming together.

How did you come up with this capsule collection?

I don’t feel that I came up with it on my own. A lot of things came up in my back and forth with New Braves: keywords, morphologies, a system that works for both adults and children, nature, rocks, explosions, spores, bees, drops of water.

I packed some of these ideas into images I made entirely on the computer, and others started as sketches I built up with a red pencil.

After I shared my drawings, these new braves adapted them and tested out materials, and as we found things that didn’t come out exactly as we envisioned, we would go back to the drawing board to improve them and re-think our methods.

How do you feel when you see your work on a beautiful item of clothing like these ones?

The same joy I felt when I saw the printed copies of my first fanzines, or when you suddenly see one of your paintings hanging in an office somewhere. It’s the sense that your work is now part of a quality product that exists on this earthly plane, where it both serves a purpose and gives reality a certain new flourish, adding value, ideas, and imagination.

back to connections

Bringing Opposites Together.(an interview) with Sebastian Lahera

español

Ultimately, Lahera’s role is that of constant curator of the mighty flood of virtuoso designs that flows from his own imagination. He’s a graphic poet. A wandering strategist. An inventor.

These days, he splits his time and talents between pure gastronomy and carving out a few minutes here and there to work at his desk—where he delivers gems such as Everything is Connected, his wonderful capsule collection for New Braves.

You’re a graphic designer by trade. When did you start exploring typographic design?

I think letters were always my starting point when I contemplated design projects. From there, I started learning about morphology, F&F (form and function), and other design storytelling tools.

How big a part of your everyday work life is this kind of design?

You used to spend all day in front of your computer. Now that you sell pizzas all day instead, how do you carve out that precious time for creative work?

The best part about not being at my computer all day is that it allows me to work with fewer reference points. For me, starting with a blank slate and limited resources is the basis of a winning design.

So what universe do you plunge into when you’re looking for references, then?

When it comes to typography, it’s really my parents’ library when I was a little kid that formed me. It was filled with books, magazines, and notes that brought together two very different worlds: poetry on my dad’s side and biology on my mom’s.

In my mom’s collection, I would find books 4 inches thick and bigger, filled with cryptic images of organisms, formulas, arthropods, and mitochondria, as well as landscaping and interior design encyclopedias inherited from my grandmother.

Tell us about your work for New Braves. What does the phrase Everything is Connected mean to you?

What do you feel connected to?

Number one: people’s gestures. If they laugh with their eyes, I’m theirs.

Number two: people’s hobbies. I have some friends whose dad is a deep-sea diver, and he never runs out of stories, photos, and exciting information.

Number three: wabi-sabi—when making things comes as naturally as breathing. Every breath you take is different, but they all do the job of getting oxygen into you.

Number four: food; the new life you find while fermenting food; being self-sufficient; vegetable gardens; seeds.

Number five: the number 5, because it’s made of a square and a circle—another example of opposites coming together.

How did you come up with this capsule collection?

I don’t feel that I came up with it on my own. A lot of things came up in my back and forth with New Braves: keywords, morphologies, a system that works for both adults and children, nature, rocks, explosions, spores, bees, drops of water.

I packed some of these ideas into images I made entirely on the computer, and others started as sketches I built up with a red pencil.

After I shared my drawings, these new braves adapted them and tested out materials, and as we found things that didn’t come out exactly as we envisioned, we would go back to the drawing board to improve them and re-think our methods.

How do you feel when you see your work on a beautiful item of clothing like these ones?

Bringing Opposites Together.
(an interview) with Sebastian Lahera