8 hours with Pablo Martin

We joined Pablo at work early in the morning at MUBI Lab, where he is currently the Creative Director. London is where Pablo finds himself now, but his work and life experiences have drawn him to a diverse array of art and design practices and places around Europe and abroad. At a young age, he began painting, followed by a keen interest in photography.

His design interests in high school were primarily technical, leading to an initial fascination with architecture that evolved into an obsession with typography. Each of these practices, grounded in making interesting compositions through careful consideration of relationships between visual elements (painted or measured lines of a building, the curves of a letter as it connects to a vertical) fed into Pablo’s successful career as a graphic designer—from New York, where he worked at Vignelli Associates; to Mallorca, where he moved his design firm Grafica and established Atlas; and, now, London, where he had resided once before.

We witnessed traces of these experiences, as he biked to Omotesando Café for a meeting and later invited us to his home and shared vintage movie posters that are part of a new book project, one of many throughout his career with magazines and publishers like Elephant, Phaidon, and now, Notebook from MUBI. When his son returned later in the evening, it became clear that music also constitutes a large part of his life, perhaps to no surprise.

So much of Pablo’s graphic designs depend on rhythm, bringing visual interest to functional elements like type and symbols through careful calculations of space (rests) and scale (dynamics). At Peter Wu, we strive to achieve a similar level of refinement in our simple, minimal designs.

Our day with Pablo concluded at a local pub for whiskey and a Cuban cigar: “the most British side of me,” he joked.