How I received right here: Raul Aguila
If you're interested in magazines at all, you've likely stumbled upon the work of Raul Aguila. Since graduating in 2009, the Cuban-born designer's intricate infographics and eye-catching, type-heavy designs have drawn the attention of creative directors and editors around the publishing world, gaining appearances from New York magazine to Wired.
Aguila grew up in Havana with two parents of engineers and was not always destined to work in magazines. It was only after moving to the USA at the age of nine that he was exposed for the first time to the ability of design to change the worldliness of everyday life. After a brief study of accounting at the University of Florida, he went to New York School of Visual Arts, and the rest is history.
Aguila's most recent role is as the creative director of the historic showbiz title Variety, for which he has just unveiled a major redesign to mark its 115th anniversary. Here he tells CR how he discovered his love for magazines at art school, shaped variety to usher in a new era, and why teamwork is the secret to a successful magazine.
Edition for the 115th anniversary of Variety
In discovering his creative trail I was one of those troubled kids who didn't pay much attention to math class and drew characters on the back of my notebooks. Then we moved to South Florida in the early 1990s. It was a difficult time being a migrant kid who didn't speak English, moved to an entirely different country, and moved to the States from a communist country.
I remember the first thing I noticed was that when you went to a supermarket in Cuba, there was no logo, everything was in a brown bag labeled “rice” and everything was rationed. I remember walking into an American supermarket and seeing all these logos and things like Tony the tiger yelling at me. I was really intrigued by these graphics – you can imagine having never seen anything like it – and suddenly everything seemed very bright. From that time on, I became interested in comics, design, and art.