I still remember those final months at the design school in Granada. One chapter was ending, and another was “on the horizon.” All around me, some were already buying train tickets and looking at rentals in Madrid or Barcelona. What I had experienced and heard about life in the big city neither appealed to me nor attracted me. My path in design, up to that point, had not been a straight line but an obstacle course that began in my own home when I said I wanted to study design. The news caused quite a stir.
In the 1990s, there was a real craze for college degrees that pushed families to pursue that kind of education. Going along with the trend, I enrolled in the sociology program at the University of Granada, where I spent a full year and completed the requirements. I passed everything… except statistics. At the end of the semester, I spoke with my parents and was honest: that wasn’t my thing; I was convinced I wanted to be a designer. Seeing my determination, they changed their perspective, and we started looking for options. It wasn’t easy. Back then, there were no official design programs as we know them today, except for a specialization within the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. I prepared for the art drawing entrance exam, but I failed. It was a pretty absurd process. I wasn’t good at artistic drawing, true, but I wanted to be a designer. The only option left was private education, which wasn’t as widespread in Spain back then as it is now. Barcelona seemed like a possibility, but reality set in: I was the oldest of four siblings. Although my parents would have made the financial sacrifice to send me there, I decided to look closer to home, even if it meant compromising the quality of my education I ended up studying at a private school in Granada. I ended up studying at a private school in Granada.
During my college years, I never actually left my hometown; I commuted every day on a 40-minute bus ride between Granada and Loja. To pay for my expenses, I worked on weekends at a local pub in the town center. There, I did everything: I served drinks, played music, and, almost naturally, began designing the posters for the live concerts we organized. At first, in a clear and unconscious homage to my grandfather’s work, I made those posters by hand, using my own black markers. Shortly after, as was bound to happen, Apple came into my life.
Looking back on that moment with hindsight, I realize that my creative destiny was already set long before I ever set foot in a school. It had been forged in the 1980s, in another magical corner of Loja: the Imperial Cinema, one of my maternal grandparents’ businesses. When I left school in the afternoons, I headed straight to the movie theater box office, where my mother was waiting for me. She had studied law but was helping my grandparents at the time. There, in the middle of the neighbors’ bustle, I would sit down to do my homework. But the real show began once my work was done. My grandfather would be waiting for me with his black markers and that magnificent, innate ability he had for drawing letters.I would be spellbound, watching him with deep admiration as he hand-lettered the showtime signs that we would later paste over the official posters. Imagine what it meant for a six- or seven-year-old boy to grow up surrounded by giant movie posters for films like “A New Hope”, “The Empire Strikes Back”, “Return of the Jedi” or “Poltergeist.” That ticket booth was my first school of art direction; my grandfather’s strokes were my first lesson in typography.
That experience began to foster in me a special sensibility, a way of looking at the world that was different from how children my age saw it. I noticed it in my Santillana textbooks, designed with such a clean, geometric, and refined visual system that they seemed straight out of the Bauhaus itself—and I never dared to scribble on them. Or when I went with my friends to the newsstand; I always lagged behind, observing the shapes of the letters, the contrast of the colors, and the illustrations on the wrappers. The world of design and I were already on first-name terms on the streets of Loja. That’s why, when the time came for the great exodus to the capital cities after finishing school, my decision was to stay and hold my ground. To stay where my roots were. I knew what I was getting myself into: choosing total relocation to a rural area seemed like professional suicide, a conscious renunciation of countless opportunities.
My first steps were dizzying, but there were things on my personal scale that were non-negotiable. I didn’t want a prestigious zip code; I wanted quality of life. I wanted to keep living on those streets that had watched me grow up, in that open-hearted rural community where genuine human connections are like pure oxygen. I wanted to take two steps and breathe in nature, hear the breeze rustling through the tree branches along with the song of countless birds in the undergrowth along the Genil River. But above all, I wanted to design my own life.
Years later, when my daughters were born, I understood the true value of that choice: being able to take them to school, eat with them, and accompany them to their after-school activities. I chose not to miss out on their childhood. And in doing so, paradoxically, I found my greatest competitive advantage as a creator.
When I settled in Loja, at that initial stage, access to the big corporations in the capital cities was out of the question. But I decided to turn that problem into an opportunity, to focus on what was right in front of me: the businesses and brands in rural areas. Where others saw limitations, I found authenticity. Instead of empty corporate briefings, these brands gave me something much better: products full of truth. Honest, committed, circular, and healthy products, the result of the daily effort and sweat of the women and men of our land. People who placed their trust in me because we spoke the same language—the language of looking each other in the eye and fighting to keep our word.
I realized that creativity needs that authenticity. And the social openness of my town shaped my perspective, leading me to create a purer design, free from the cookie-cutter trends that sometimes overwhelm big cities. It didn’t take long for the industry to realize that down south, in a remote border town, things were starting to make a splash. The work I began doing from my studio in Loja for those rural brands brought me visibility and recognition: the Forbes list of the 100 most creative Spaniards in the business world, three Gold Laus awards for those designs with the scent of the countryside, roots, and social commitment, along with several more in silver and bronze—the most important national awards in our profession.
Suddenly, the kid who used to draw posters with a marker at the local pub was taking the stage at prestigious design festivals, his work validated by his achievements. Today, that same drive allows me to work—alongside my team—on a national and international level, as well as give talks and lectures at universities and design schools. All of this without leaving my hometown and without giving up meals with my daughters.
Today, when I look back, I realize that staying in Loja didn’t take away opportunities from me, it gave me the right ones. My career is proof that design isn’t just shaped by mass culture or noise, but also by respect for one’s roots. You don’t have to walk down the “Castellana” or the “Diagonal” every day for the industry to look toward small towns. To the new designers graduating from schools today, I would say: don’t buy into other people’s narratives. Your roots don’t just anchor you, they also help you grow and propel you forward. Don’t be afraid to commit to your surroundings, because today’s market is desperately seeking the authenticity found only in the local. I’m a creative director, I work nationally and internationally alongside my team, and I enjoy my family every day. I enjoy the professional status I always dreamed of, but above all, I continue to achieve the greatest success a person can have: being the absolute master of my own life. And all of this, from my village. At the border.
Ramón Soler
Creative Director. Buenaventura.
