At the first weekend of the year, Barbot Bernardo, Cru Creative Hub and RDI, Rede de Inovação, brought together a group of old and new friends in our space for an afternoon of conversation and networking.

We planned to bring together our local networks linked to consultancy, project management and international cooperation with people we have worked with over the last few years. It was. It was a collision between the worlds of cultural and creative industries, innovation and education, and we promise to organize more editions in the next few months.

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.

All our design projects start with a deep dive into our studio's ever-expanding library; today, it wasn't different.

We are in the early stages of a project for a hotel chain, starting a rebranding and strategic repositioning process.

We are exploring five possible paths in the creative direction and selected titles in art, craft, food culture, urban living, hospitality and interior design for our first brainstorming with the client.

Our work with Susto began in 2021 with a strategic consultancy process to define the business model for the brand. Subsequently, our studio took on the challenge of creating a new identity.

The creative direction of the graphic project bounced between two possible paths: one inspired by neo-postmodernist currents, closely linked to the creative direction of the brand itself and the client's artistic work, and that of brutalism, in the most literal sense of the word and therefore more linked to the materiality of the objects and the author's experimental process.

The challenge of GatewayCrafts Communication Design is to be itself an alluring gateway for potential students, as well as audiences looking for information and new discourses about creative industries, artisanal work and small-scale manufacturing. The goal is to communicate the project's positioning, what distinguishes it in this universe, demonstrate technical rigour with lightness and fluidity, and, above all, create curiosity.

It was the first weeks of 2022 when Filipa and Hugo, the power duo behind the multidisciplinary studio FAHR 021.3, asked us to help them design a new strategy for their practice. The Porto studio was about to turn ten years old and was growing organically, having already achieved a remarkable international reach.

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.

Our love for all typography's details originated Nova Type Foundry's Type Glossary. A Glossary of typography terminology comprises 32 posts where you can find information on several topics from typeface classifications, glyphs' anatomy, legibility rules, type design tips and much more.

Hugo Branco from Vic - Aveiro Arts House and Navalha, Associação Cultural, challenged us to design the identity of Break In Case of Emergency 2023, a kind of festival dedicated to sharing practical knowledge on themes and trends that affect the music industry.

"BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY is a two-week hybrid boot camp for independent musicians and labels, focused on exchanging practical skills concerning some of the most pressing aspects of today's independent music industry.”

Those who have followed us over these years, and there are already a few, know that Saber Fazer and Ofício are siblings, offsprings from the same mother company. As a result, we share a roof, resources, team, management and even Capitão, the studio dog.
The story of this union is one we have never told. We have yet to explain the relationships, parallels and collisions between their activities, which, being very different, complement each other.

"I love every one of the letters in the word Grampa. They work together in a very harmonic manner, and I explored different designs with great detail. I wanted an organic 'G' with a big, unconventional loop harmonising the other letters. "

Saber Fazer / Ofício has been an associate member of the ECHN - European Creative Hubs Network since the beginning of the year!

The positioning of Saber Fazer as an aggregator and facilitator in the universe of artisanal work and small-scale industrial production and its relevant role as a training entity, combined with the experience of Ofício in supporting entrepreneurs and businesses in the creative industries, has led us to participate in different projects and networks that go beyond our national borders.

GatewayCrafts was launched in January! GatewayCrafts is an Erasmus+ project proposed and coordinated by Saber Fazer / Ofício and which has @cru_creativehub (Portugal) and @materahub (Italy) as partners. The project consists of preparing pilots to facilitate access to technical knowledge in small-scale manufacturing and artisan work. In addition, over the next few months, we will be developing and distributing high-quality educational content free of charge, oriented and adapted for contemporary audiences and digital media.

Recently we finished the branding and graphic design strategy for a leading Portuguese catering solutions provider.

The challenge with ONEX (Onexperience Group) entailed simplifying how the brand is presented in different markets and developing a new identity and shared visual system for the seven companies composing the conglomerate.

We developed a comprehensive visual system to organize the brand presence in different media. The strategy was to put forward a strong presence, combining typographic elements with an expansible set of symbols and colours representing each of the present and future business areas.

After difficult times during the pandemic, Bombarda, Porto's Art District community, came together again to favour different projects, fostering innovation and networking in a frankly and continually creative territory.
BOMBARDA is a podcast dedicated to everyday topics in the Miguel Bombarda neighbourhood in Porto. Made by and for residents of this territory - whether residents or entrepreneurs - this space exists to record and amplify reflections and discussions around the local development of the well-known "Art District" in Porto, whether these are cultural issues, social, environmental, urbanistic or economic.

We open the year 2023 with excellent news: Ofício/ SABER FAZER has become a Vocational Education and Training (VET) provider certified in Portugal by DGERT!

The project took several weeks, and, like all internal projects, creating a new website for Ofício was constantly pressured by the tight schedule of other things.
The need arose in 2021 when we launched the new Ofício identity. The site, which had evolved disorganizedly over the years, was no longer fulfilling its function, not even remotely. It didn't even respect the direction that Miguel Moreira had given our identity.

Ana Paula Almeida, artist and maker, among many other things, came to us with a challenge. To think strategically about the brand, she was creating for a product and, based on that thought, to develop the entire visual identity.
The product in question is a lamp whose most distinctive feature (in addition to the design) is that it is built with wool yarn. These yarns are the leftover stock from the wool factory that now houses the New Hand Lab, a life project by Ana.

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.

Cru was founded in 2012. The original logo was used for almost one decade until the founders asked us to help rebrand this iconic space in the heart of Porto's art district. By then, we had just finished a strategy project that repositioned Cru from a Cowork to a Creative Hub, something we will tell later in a different post.