Challenging the brief

Art Director and Designer, Liliana Saldanha, had spent two years in London freelancing, working at different agencies before eventually settling in her role at OPX Studio.

Her time is now mainly spent travelling between the Studio and Portugal every month which enables her to draw on different inspirations for her work. She also discusses the current fascist movements in Brazil and how the powerful community-led opposition against it serves as another example of inspiration.

Originally from Lisbon, Liliana was armed with a desire to explore London and a portfolio that could offer insight into the Portuguese market.

“I would do long periods of freelancing. People would ask if I wanted to settle and work full-time, but I was really enjoying passing from one studio to another, to find out more about the market and how people were working”.

OPX was a company in the capital that had caught her attention. “I went for an interview as a freelancer but one of their designers had just left and they were looking for someone permanent. Even though I was still very curious to explore the industry in London, I felt like this was also a very good opportunity for me to settle for a bit.”

Fast forward seven years and she’s definitely settled. She’s surprised at this one-time freelancer’s now full-time position, describing being a designer at one place for this amount of time, especially in London, as “very rare”. She pays compliment to the nature of OPX’s work, allowing her to stay personally and creatively invested for this amount of time. “It’s never been too linear”, both Liliana’s creative journey and the company’s evolution.

International Inspiration

But there is another aspect to her work that helps her stay focused — when she’s not working. Three weeks are spent in the studio and then every fourth week of the month is based in a world away from the creative prickle of the Hoxton studio, travelling back to Portugal to work on other projects and see family and friends.

“It’s a re-fresh”, she explains to me. “I’m working with a friend (also a designer) on a project — the objective is to re-shape the way we consume products by extending the expiry date of them, it’s called Expiry Matters. Our first initiative is going to be based on clothes.” Together they’ve recently bought a house in Portugal, an investment that they hope one day they can convert into a form of business or a creative space.

Does the time she spends in Portugal inform any of her work when returning to London? “I think I probably have references that are different from my colleagues. I’m still very aware of the arts scene back in Portugal — music, fashion, design. I think that probably helps inspire my work here. Just because you’re a designer, it doesn’t mean it can only be design that inspires you. It should be a bunch of things.”

A Portuguese urban street artist, Vhils, is one of those things. “He has initiatives all over Lisbon, and a cultural platform and gallery called Underdogs. He even created an urban music and art festival called Iminiente, which is a favourite of mine.”

Using creativity to build collective movements is what Liliana finds impressive about his work. “I find it empowering when small communities work together. I like people that are not only concerned with themselves but are joining with others and doing collaborative work. For a long time, there was a bit of detachment towards joining with others but it seems more important than ever now.”

The political scene in Brazil offers a much darker backdrop against which another example of community collaboration is playing out. A country in a state of fracture even before the Amazon fires, with protests against President Jair Bolsonaro being led by teachers and students. “Brazil is on a very thin line to complete fascism, dictatorship, and when you see these people trying to create movements and uprising so that doesn’t happen, it’s powerful. It’s important that ideas converge and people get together.”

‘Curiosity Talks’

And it’s those sorts of wide-spread inspirations that peppers her pet project, ‘Curiosity Talks’ which she launched three years ago.

Liliana invites a guest speaker to OPX’s studio to talk about their life which then evolves into a chat between her colleagues and the guest.

“The idea with Curiosity Talks was to think, how could we sometimes turn off what we’re doing and open up a different dialogue? We need to feed on something different that is not always design or looking at briefs. We have to learn to get out of our computers. Curiosity Talks tries to take us out of our comfort zones”.

One of the most recent guests she invited to the studio was war photographer, Giles Duley (pictured to the left). His story is certainly an inspiring one — a photographer who swapped the glamour world of music shoots for the grit of war-torn countries. During his embedment with the US Army in Afghanistan, Giles was left with devastating injuries from an exploding landmine, losing his arm and his leg. However, instead of this experience curbing his enthusiasm, he continues to work as a photographer.

“I’d seen him speak before and everything about his work, to his personal story previous to war, during war and post-war is just so interesting.”

With Giles and so many of her guests, which have ranged from street artists to arctic explorers, Liliana believes their stories are just as important as their work, and so Curiosity Talks is used as a vehicle to promote these personal stories. More are planned for the future.

A collective force

Curiosity Talks isn’t the only thing that keeps her and the rest of the studio collaborative. The nature of the working environment itself takes care of this. “We’re not a big studio so we immerse ourselves in all types of jobs…everyone touches different levels of the work.”

“At OPX we all have different skills but they come together when we’re working on projects. I really enjoy that element. I like working with different visions and putting them together…finding different outcomes to those that you would achieve by yourself. There’s also freedom to challenge the brief.”

And as a Portuguese freelancer-turned-London-based Art Director and Designer, travelling creator and creative curator all in one, challenging the brief is certainly something that Liliana Saldanha is only too familiar with.

Liliana Saldanha is Art Director and Designer at OPX
Follow Liliana on instagram here.
Interview by Henry King, Copywriter

Article first published on OPX Medium