Ilhas Studio

Ilhas is a graphic design studio with a multidisciplinary approach. It was created in 2013 out of the meeting between Catarina Vasconcelos and Margarida Rêgo and their desire to bring a spirit of experimentation to graphic design. The studio has been recognised in the areas of editorial design, digital design, art direction and identity. The personal and professional paths of Catarina Vasconcelos (cinema) and Margarida Rêgo (animation and photography) have influenced the studio's practice, allowing the duo and their team to bring a multifaceted and contemporary look to the projects they develop. From graphic identity to social media strategy, from editorial design to web design, from exhibition design to motion graphics, Ilhas’s had the the privilege of collaborating with world-class institutions, artists and cinema directors. Concern with social and environmental issues ilhas studio focus on telling stories and narratives through design.

Ilhas' Talk

Art, Freedom and Activism

We moved to London in 2011. At around that time, thousands of people were joining the Occupy movement, which had started in New York and quickly spread to other large cities around the world. It didn’t take long before St Paul’s cathedral had become one of the main stages for a movement that sought to rethink our democracy and urged us to think actively and dynamically about the way we lived and the systems that sustained us. ‘We are the 99%’ was the movement’s motto, and we, newly arrived in London, made it ours.

One of our strongest memories from that time is of sitting in a class at the Royal College of Art, and Brian Eno saying, inspiringly: ‘artists are children who grew up and still want to play’, a riff on Picasso’s quote. 

Occupy and play.
Think and draw.
Listen and make. 

2021. Ten years had passed. We had already moved back to Lisbon, our hometown.
As we went about our daily lives, running around from one place to another, to get to work, to meet with clients, we kept asking ourselves ‘Is there still time?’
‘For what?’ you might ask.
‘For change.’ 

In 2021 we organized a half-marathon for the Walk&Talk festival in the Azores. We called it ‘We're running out of time’.
Stop and run.

Something of that auspicious moment had stayed with us. Not only the motto, but the movement’s tenets, and its methods: the importance of listening, the moral imperative to think and rethink the world. Those were the ideas that ilhas studio was founded on.

So we had the idea of creating a game within the race, where runners wore their own slogans pinned to their t-shirts while they ran. Some of these slogans echoed the preoccupations of other protests around the world: ‘There is no planet B!’, ‘No more bullfighting!’, ‘My body my choice!’.
Play and politics. 

We like to see our studio, our design practice, as this child who grows but still wants to play, who keeps asking questions, who still enjoys pretend play, who never stops using its imagination.
Even when we're talking about things as serious as our freedom.
Ask and Pretend.