In the new episode of Ossos do Ofício, Miguel Barbot talks to Hugo Branco, musician and producer, artistic director of VIC // Aveiro Arts House.

We talked about how you take on a family house that had been closed for twelve years and was at risk of being sold, and turn it into a creative ecosystem spread across five floors. Who pays the bills at the start, how long it takes before there is any room to do anything else, and how you sustain a cultural project without continuous funding.

The conversation covers the guest house that finances everything else, the relationship with Aveiro's cultural fabric, because a project like this does not survive in isolation, and the question that never gets settled in these structures: whether to grow or not, and with what team.

At the end of the episode, Hugo talks about VIC NIC, the house's record label, about the work of conserving the legacy of his grandfather, Vasco Branco, and of the rest of the family, including his mother, the poet Rosa Alice Branco. And about his own musical projects, such as Piurso.

In May we had the privilege of welcoming, for the second time in just over a year, our dear friend Dörte de Jesus, founder of The Lissome magazine, a visit that was made possible with the support of the P2P programme of the European Creative Hubs network, of which our organisations are members.

We recorded and filmed this session for an episode of the Ossos do Ofício podcast (to be published by the end of the first season), but already available on our Youtube channel.

In this episode, Miguel Barbot talks to Joana Correia, a type designer with fifteen years' experience and the founder of Nova Type Foundry.

We talked about her career, from her early work with Google Fonts to her collaboration with The Type Founders in the United States, and above all about what is rarely discussed: how much it actually costs to design a typeface, how long it takes before it starts to pay off, and how you build a sustainable business in a market that is global but niche (and dominated by large platforms). The conversation covers sales and licensing channels, the industry's shift towards subscription models, and what all of this means for independent foundries, many of them micro-businesses. At the end of the episode, Joana explains how Ligado Studio came about, founded with Paley Dreier to support type designers and foundries in developing their businesses.

Early this year, Cidália, Joana, and Sofia, the founding trio of Oupas Design, visited our office to discuss a possible project to help them restructure the company.

The company was turning fifteen and was facing many challenges: Joana, a fundamental part of the trio, was leaving the studio to pursue new projects. Sofia and Cidália felt that this could damage their motivation, leading to extra work and less focus on their individual needs.

This post is the second part of the interview with our good friend and partner Joana Correia from Nova Type Foundry (you can read the first part here).

For this second part of the interview, we packed great insights about the creative process of designing a new typeface, the specifics of independent foundries, being a woman in design, the business of typedesign, Joana's inspirations and a few reading recommendations for those starting a career.

“Being full-time in Saber Fazer/Ofício happened quite naturally: working side-by-side with my wife provides a sort of dream situation where all the professional and personal objectives are perfectly aligned. ”

In January 2023, the GatewayCrafts project was launched, coordinated by Barbot Bernardo (Saber Fazer / Ofício).  We already had the opportunity to meet Alice Bernardo, co-founder of Saber Fazer/Ofício and the GatewayCrafts project. It is now time to get to know another face of this project, Miguel Barbot.

Porto-based Joana Correia, founder of Nova Type Foundry, has been a great inspiration. Joana has helped us grow as a design studio since we first sat down here on Rua da Aliança just over two years ago.

With her support, we have worked on ideas for new projects, learned so much about Type Design and the Type Foundries business, and met and maintained contact with many of the great talents of this international community.

Alice Bernardo is the founder of Saber Fazer and Ofício. She is a specialist in education and transmission of technical knowledge in the fields of handmade and semi-industrial production in Portugal. She works as a trainer, consultant and researcher, specialising in producing raw materials and creating sustainable production chains from the environmental, social and economic points of view.

Alice shared with our GatewayCrafts project team a few words about her professional career and the birth of this project. During the interview, it was possible to understand better what led her and her business partner, Miguel Barbot, to develop GatewayCrafts and their goals.

Something is intriguing about João Bernardino's feed. If we skip through images, all of his references make themselves visible - something that the photographer admits. The object is almost every time industrial, and the picture is at an uneasy scale. The infrastructure dominates the aesthetics. Although at almost every stage of João's work, there's the presence of either a worker, the labour or object from that activity, even when the first is (apparently) absent.