He is the founder and the creative director of his own design studio. Since 2001 his designs have carried his undisputed personal touch: Pedro González is Estudio Pedro González Gráfica y Comunicación. Educated at the Technical School of Design, Architecture, and Engineering of CEU UCH, he began in 1996 on a path on which his works have been awarded, chosen, and published by prestigious annuals and magazines of the field. The student who fell in love with design in the classrooms of CEU UCH has become a well-known professional who created his own studio. 20 years later he has returned to his School as a professor of the Master’s degree programme in Product Design and as a “non-lecturer” for the students of Industrial Design.
It is very likely that we have had the creativity of Pedro González present on our tables in more than one occasion, for example in the packaging of a wine bottle. Or, on one of the screens that give us access to the digital world, through his web designs. Or, we might have come across some place defined by the personal style of his signage. Design is in everything, it surrounds us, and Pedro González is a part of it. In his opinion, “to design is to decide, to know how to solve, to find solutions where others see obstacles.” Only he could put a black label on a bottle of white wine.
He was painting surfboards…
“I was painting surfboards at the beach and they told me about the Technical School at CEU UCH. I enrolled, and here I fell in love with design which is now my job, my passion, and my life. It was so since the first day, since the first visit we made to an exhibition of Pepe Gimeno in El Carmen, with Manolo Bañó, who was my teacher and is now my friend.” From these times at the School Pedro González remembers the names of the “top-level” design professionals who were his teachers at CEU UCH, such as Bañó, Paco Bascuñán, Marisa Gallén, Marcelo Martínez Lax… “CEU is a winning model: current professionals educating minds enthusiastic about design.”
…sketching again and again…
Together with these professionals and teachers of design he spent hours and hours sketching, again and again, piling up drawings until reaching an idea, familiarising himself with creative processes some of which he still maintains. This “love story” that came to be at the classrooms has lasted until today: “I started working at CEU, then at my mother’s house, then I started working for teachers like Marisa and Sandra Figuerola, then for the National Design Award winner Daniel Nebot…”
…until he was selling muscatel in Korea!
Today 75% of his work is focused on the packaging of a dozen of important wineries (Hispano Suizas, Baronía de Turís, Vegamar, Murviedro…) and the food industry, working with superstores like Mercadona and Consum and with gourmet products. And he is also involved in some international projects, also in which good packaging is the key to business: “We have sold muscatel from Cheste in Korea, adapting the packaging to the tastes of the Koreans, getting to know other cultures. We have designed bottles for white wine with a black label, breaking stereotypes, which have been sold in New York… Twenty years have passed like this and I am still in love with my job, still earning my living with it.”
Many studios for thousands of companies
Far from the stereotypes of the “star designers, so distant, so godly, and so conceptually conceptual”, Pedro González sees himself as a normal professional who one day decided to establish his own studio: “There are thousands of design studios that work for thousands of companies; that are real professionals of design; that have a lot to say. Those that are studying now just have to find their own place, their own space, in this world.”
Postgraduate classes…
At the Technical School of CEU UCH Pedro González is not a student anymore, nor is he just a former student: he has been a professor of the Master’s degree in Product Design since 2014. “I try to bring to the postgraduate students my 20 years of experience in the world of design, and give it to them on the plate, ready to be sliced and eaten.”
…and “non-lectures”
During his encounters with students of Industrial Design Pedro has decided to offer them “non-lectures”. His “non-lectures” have included, for example, a tasting of one of the wines the packaging of which he designed, because one has to know the product! “I came to talk to you as I would have talked to myself in the past,” he has said to the design students at CEU UCH, and advised them: “To design is to decide, also your future. Skip the processes, be curious, there is a need hungry people… find that point of madness.”
Part of a “winning model”
“A designer is finished only when they have nothing to say.” Without doubt, Pedro González has many more things to say in the world of design. His School, this “winning model” that educates professionals like him, thanks to professionals like him, will always be open for him to come and share what he has to say.
