Three poetry books that turn anxiety, longing, and memory into a designed object.

Mente Ruidosa ("Noisy Mind") is my Bachelor's thesis for Design & Creative Technologies at UPV Valencia, subtitled the creation of three poetry books as a work of emotional self-reflection. It began with my own experience of anxiety during adolescence, when writing became a way to turn mental chaos into order. The poems came first; the project gave them a body.

The work combines typography, photography, and illustration to explore one central question — how word and image can work together to express what neither can say alone. The result is three hand-bound books, each holding a different emotion, gathered inside a custom slipcase: Cartas para nadie (blue), Una mente que grita (red), and Historias que nunca sucedieron (sepia).

Externalising emotion as a design problem.

The conceptual starting point is simple but serious: holding emotions in is bad for us, and externalising them — through writing, photography, art — is a recognised tool for processing them and building emotional intelligence. Graphic resources can carry what words cannot. Mente Ruidosa puts that idea to work, treating the page as a space where text and image enrich each other rather than repeat each other.

A key principle throughout is the ellipsis: leaving things unsaid. Details are omitted so the reader fills the connections implicitly, building their own emotional reading instead of receiving a closed one.

Studying how word and image have lived together.

The project is grounded in a study of the relationship between poetry and photography — from early pioneers to the idea of the photopoem, where poem and photograph hold equal weight and are tightly bound, and calligrams, where typography is arranged into figures related to the poem's meaning. Analysing existing works set the rules for my own: how to lay out text according to its length, how to keep word and image independent yet mutually reinforcing, how a reduced palette and the shape of a photograph can structure a page.

One system, three emotional registers.

Early drafts kept all the chapters in a single book, but the design never cohered — so I split them into three, each holding one emotion, then unified them inside a slipcase titled Mente Ruidosa. A near-A5 format (19×13 cm) keeps the books easy to handle and the compositions from feeling too vertical. A flexible grid with many divisions allows every page to be unique while staying coherent.

The covers are deliberately minimal — cream stock, Neue Haas Unica in bold, a single distinctive detail hinting at the book's interior, and the author's signature on the back. Inside, the contrast begins: the typewriter typeface Appareo, used across all its ink-pressure weights, gives the interiors a personal, emotional texture. Each book opens with an introductory line on cream in the chapter's colour, and closes with a final line set over an image.

Pauses built into the reading.

"Rest pages" with full photography were added to balance the design and give the eye somewhere to pause between poems. Every photograph in the three books is spontaneous — taken in real moments: outings, everyday scenes, street shots, and self-portraits. Worked in Photoshop toward beige-and-black tones, they take on an analogue quality, high in contrast and grain.

Sustainable papers, hand-stitched binding.

The books are printed on Materica Gesso 120g — a textured, sustainable stock that lifts both typography and image — with tracing-paper pages added for interaction. The slipcase uses Tintoretto 220g, textured and slightly glossy, suited to packaging. Both papers are FSC-certified. Binding is Singer-sewn, reinforcing the handmade character, allowing coloured threads and a flat 180° opening. The slipcase echoes the covers in black, with a spine and an introduction explaining the collection and naming the three books inside.

A complete, hand-produced object — and a way of working.

Across a long process of structuring calligrams and tuning the relationship between word and image, the three books came together as one coherent collection: a minimal exterior holding an experimental interior, a reduced palette and a single typeface building an atmosphere aligned with the poems. The project is also aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals — emotional wellbeing through art (3), self-knowledge through experimental design (4), and responsible, low-impact materials (12).

Beyond the thesis, Mente Ruidosa shows an ability to carry one concept-driven idea across hundreds of pages, three formats, and a full physical production process — from typography and original photography to binding and finishing — without losing its emotional core. There are plans to produce further copies for wider distribution.

Build a magazine from zero — concept, name, identity, art direction, and photography.

SYNC was created for an editorial design course with an open but demanding brief: invent a magazine from nothing. Not just lay out an existing publication, but define its reason to exist — its theme, audience, and voice — then design every part of it: the name, the logo, the full art direction, the grid and typographic system, and the cover photography, built so the magazine could run as an ongoing series with future issues and a final special edition.

I designed a complete first issue end to end. The article texts are sourced from existing publications and credited inside the magazine, which is a non-commercial academic project; everything else — concept, identity, layout system, and all cover photography — is original work.

Music as the centre — everything else in sync with it.

SYNC — short for synchronize — is a music magazine that goes deeper than trends. It keeps up with what's happening now (new scenes, emerging genres, artists from other continents) but also runs investigative features that connect music to science and psychology: what music does to the brain, how it affects concentration. The name captures the idea of bringing different subjects into one rhythm, with music as the constant. The tagline — música y algo más… (music and something more) — sets that expectation on every cover.

The target reader is young, curious, and music-obsessed — drawn to the culture, the history, and the deeper questions, not just the charts.

From a shortlist of names to a logo built on parentheses.

The name was chosen from a shortlist — Gost, Waker, Greca, Booster, Delirio, Cuerda, Frisson — landing on SYNC for its meaning and its bite. "Synchronize" implies two or more things working in harmony, which is exactly what the magazine does: it brings music, science, psychology, and discovery into one rhythm.

The logotype is set in Bebas Neue and wrapped in parentheses — (SYNC). The parentheses are not decorative; they work as a system. Throughout the magazine they frame issue numbers, create abbreviations, and generate playful compositions — becoming the visual signature of the brand. The baseline pairs the tagline in Archivo, italic, widely tracked.

Clean studio photography with room to play.

I wanted the covers to feel energetic and immediate — like a sticker you'd slap on a notebook — so the photographic direction is built on studio shots against clean white backgrounds. The white creates the cut-out effect naturally: each figure feels removed from a surface, shadowed, integrated yet standing apart. This allows the same image to work at any scale, on any background colour, across different issue palettes.

Each image plays with perspective, bodily deformation, and physical expression — models are shot from above, below, or extremely close, pushing proportions to create visual impact. Colour is governed by visual harmony rather than a fixed rule, rotating with each issue. The back cover takes the same figure and reduces it to a single monochromatic tone, unifying each number and creating a clear front-to-back identity system.

A grid that rotates — built on sound-wave logic.

SYNC is built so its elements can rotate freely from issue to issue, allowing different compositions while staying recognisable. The format is 21×25 cm with a 0.5 cm spine, printed CMYK on white laid 300g cover stock. Every cover carries a recurring frame made of 2 pt brackets — a motif taken directly from the shape of sound-wave measurement diagrams, tying the visual system back to music at a structural level. The masthead, issue number, monograph name, date, and price all have defined positions but can shift within the system.

Typography pairs Bebas Neue for display with the Archivo family across weights for headers, body, and captions — a flexible hierarchy that keeps long-form features and short reviews coherent.

One system, four issues, one special edition.

The magazine was conceived as a collection, not a single issue. Each number is a "monograph" built around a theme, designed so the publication could grow over time while staying coherent.

001 — Renacimiento explores the return of musical styles: comebacks, the resurgence of sounds from past decades, and new genres that have emerged in the last ten years. A look at how music reinvents itself by looking back.

002 — El Sentir moves into the intersection of music with science and psychology. What happens in the brain when we listen to music? Can it genuinely improve concentration and productivity? This issue bridges the emotional experience of music with the research behind it.

003 — Descubrimiento is the fully developed issue, themed around finding what you haven't heard yet: lesser-known artists, scenes from other continents, platform-driven recommendations, and playlists designed for discovery. It asks the reader to step outside their comfort zone.

00? — Edición Especial breaks the format. Instead of a fixed theme, it opens the magazine to its audience — shared music, personal recommendations, interviews with everyday listeners about their tastes, opinion pieces, and questionnaires. Connection and interaction replace curation.

A complete editorial pipeline — from concept to print.

SYNC is the project where I learned that designing a magazine is not designing pages — it's designing a system. Every decision (the name, the parentheses, the sticker photography, the sound-wave brackets, the monochromatic backs) had to work not just once, but across four issues and a special edition. That constraint shaped everything.

The result demonstrates a full editorial pipeline: strategy, naming, identity, photography, grid development, typesetting, and print specification — built as a scalable system, not a one-off layout.

Find a real fashion designer. Produce a fashion film for their collection.

For a Photography Direction course at UPV, each team was assigned to partner with a real fashion designer and produce a short fashion film showcasing their collection — handling every stage from concept development and storyboarding through to shooting, editing, and color grading. Our team of six partnered with Arantxa Jiménez, a Valencia-based designer whose eponymous collection blends chic, formal silhouettes with bold colour.

This was a collaborative project from start to finish, requiring tight coordination across pre-production, a multi-location shoot, and post-production — with every team member holding clearly defined roles.

Light as the protagonist — no props, no distractions, only garments and atmosphere.

The defining decision of the project was to let light carry every frame. We rejected props, set dressing, or busy backgrounds that would compete with the garments. Instead, LED panels with colour filters became our main tool: bathing the studio in warm oranges, blues, and purples, and using directional light to project geometric shapes — circles, rectangles, oblique lines — directly into the frame. The clothes were always the point of focus; light built the atmosphere around them.

The narrative approach favoured a high volume of shots, varied angles, and alternating editing over a conventional storyline. The aesthetic is dynamic and chromatically complementary — orange against blue, warm against cool — with a pace that builds throughout the film.

Interior: hard shadows, burned colour backgrounds, no fill light.

The interior lighting scheme was deliberately stripped back: two key lights burning colour onto the background, no fill lights, no backlights. The absence of fill was a conscious choice — it lets shadows mark depth in the frame and emphasises the texture and weight of the fabrics. The light quality shifts between soft and hard depending on the scene, but the hard, directional studio light dominates, projecting shapes that structure the composition.

Exterior scenes shifted to a less experimental register: natural light supplemented with portable LEDs and reflectors to fill shadows, shot against modern architectural locations that gave the compositions geometry and scale without adding visual clutter.

Storyboards, lighting diagrams, and camera plans — before a single frame was shot.

Every scene was planned in detail before the shoot. The pre-production included a full global conception document defining the lighting approach, chromatic palette, and compositional rules for both interior and exterior, as well as shot-by-shot storyboards with camera angles, movements, and transitions mapped out. Scene 2 alone — the most visually experimental section — was storyboarded across 16 individual shots, specifying overhead angles, fisheye perspectives, handheld lateral movements, and precise moments where the model interacts with projected light, wraps in translucent material, and writes the brand name on a surface.

This level of preparation was what made the shoot itself efficient: everyone arrived knowing exactly what needed to happen.

Reinforcing the atmosphere that the lighting built on set.

I handled the color grading alongside Giorgia Missinato. The grade was designed to reinforce — not replace — what the LED lighting had already built on set: pushing the saturation of the warm oranges and cool blues, deepening the shadows where fill light was deliberately absent, and maintaining the overall cool temperature that defines the film's emotional tone. The goal was coherence across very different lighting conditions (controlled studio vs. open exterior daylight) so the film reads as one continuous visual world.

Six people, clearly defined roles, and the coordination to make it work.

This project was built on organisation. Every stage — concept, pre-production documents, shooting plans, lighting setups, the edit — required the team to work in sync. The result reflects that: a coherent fashion film produced under real constraints of time, equipment, and location access, where every team member knew their role and delivered on it.

A complete audiovisual production — from concept to final grade.

The fashion film was delivered as a 1'29" piece with a full pre-production pipeline behind it: concept documents, moodboards, storyboards, lighting diagrams, and camera plans — all prepared before a single frame was recorded. For me, this project brought together concept development, on-set collaboration, and post-production colour work as a complete pipeline for the first time, and showed how much a well-coordinated team can achieve under real production constraints.

A complete brand identity for Renowatio — from naming logic to full visual system.

Renowatio is a brand identity project developed as part of my studies at UPV. The brief called for a complete visual identity — logo, colour system, typography, and brand guidelines — for a company in the sustainability and renovation space. The name itself (from Latin: renewal, restoration) shaped the entire visual direction.

Sustainability without the clichés: no leaf, no green gradient.

Branding in the sustainability sector is saturated with familiar visual shorthand — earth tones, circular marks, organic shapes. The challenge was building an identity that communicated renewal and precision without defaulting to those conventions. Renowatio needed to feel considered and modern, without sacrificing warmth.

From logo to guidelines: a complete, deployable identity.

The final deliverable included logo variations (primary, monochrome, reversed), a colour palette, typography pairing, application mockups across stationery and digital, and a brand guidelines document. The identity was built to work at every scale — from a business card to a building sign.

A hand-crafted poster series for Venezuelan band Los Mesoneros — merging digital illustration with traditional printmaking.

This project was a personal and academic exploration of calcography (intaglio printmaking) applied to contemporary music poster design. Los Mesoneros — a beloved Venezuelan rock band — provided the cultural subject; the project challenged me to develop an illustration system that translated meaningfully between digital and physical print processes.

Making a print process feel contemporary without erasing its craft character.

Calcography is a technique defined by its constraints — pressure, plate depth, ink viscosity. The challenge was developing an illustration approach that worked with these constraints rather than against them, producing work that felt genuinely printmade rather than digitally simulated.

From sketch to plate to printed edition.

The illustration was developed digitally in Procreate, refined to work within the tonal limitations of the intaglio process. The design was then transferred to copper plate, etched, and hand-printed in a limited edition. The result is a series of posters that carry the texture and presence of a physical artefact — which no digital file can replicate.

The project demonstrates a discipline increasingly rare among digital designers: the ability to move fluidly between screen-based and physical production processes, and to understand how each medium shapes the work.