It was late September when I visited CRU Creative Hub's brand-new audio studio. I was very excited about spending that morning with our dear friends and clients (we still owe you a post about our extensive work there). We recorded the first episode of their new Indiworkers podcast, and I had the honour of being the first to be interviewed.

Typography is a subject we love — kerning, small capitals, punctuation, alignment, baseline grids and optical sizes — we love it all. So Joana, the founder of Nova Type Foundry, asked us for help regarding Nova's social media communication: strategic marketing within a subject we hold dear.

Reading Yvon Chouinard is always a reason to reflect on what the company is doing. And on the causes that were at the genesis of Velo Culture, which are two. The first is the preservation of the environment and the fight against climate change by promoting more responsible consumption. The second is sustainable mobility and the return of our cities to the people.

"A small business, growing only as far as it should, has much more capacity to be a model business. Being obliged to create value for the customer, since without it, it cannot survive, it is also subject to very direct scrutiny and immediate impact. I work fundamentally with design and creative businesses. For them, the value is in the cocktail that combines different things: the sold product, its function, durability, responsibility in the choice of materials, provenance and ethics in the manufacturing process, history, aesthetics, artistic value, and service. All are easily noticeable and valued by those who leave their money there."

For the first episode of a series full of illustrious connoisseurs, the crazy people deciding this podcast decided it was a good idea to invite me. Maybe I'm illustrious, one never knows, but I'm certainly not a connoisseur.

“In my research, Wassily Kandinsky's "Point and line to plane" informed most of the process: I love this book, a marvellous piece exploring graphic expression, painting and geometry theories with scientific precision, relating them with dance and music.”

This project was short, lasting one month—a mentorship structured around three chapters. The first was dedicated to the magazine readers, the second to the editorial strategy and the third to the business model and the possible ways to professionalize the team editorial and content creation experience.

We started after Barbara's call asking Barbot's help in a crazy project of relaunching her grandparent's department store in downtown Porto. The new name, GRAMPA, refers to her heritage and the work of the previous generations, and a tool with the same name, a homage to handmade and small-scale production. It was a concise consulting project consisting of only three sessions.

Ofício recently finished a commission to Velo Culture, the illustration "Bicicletas Bonitas", which means Beautifull Bicycles in Portuguese, designed by Miguel Moreira. It will be a decade this year since I founded Velo Culture with two friends. The first Velo Culture bicycle shop opened in the early days of 2012 in Matosinhos, in the Fish Market. A few years later, we opened a second shop in Central Porto, which is now shared with the Ofício Studio.