Sabato

What led you into design?

When I was 14 my parents got divorced and I was attending secondary school, studying humanities (Latin, old Greek, literature, philosophy and history). I ended up moving from my city to live with my father for a while and since I was not able to attend school I ended up sitting in his office in the mornings, which at that time had a small design team. That's how it started. A few months later I was completely obsessed with learning and I decided to change schools to study graphics. Many things have changed around me since that day, but design is something that's always a constant in my life. It's interesting how a scenario that didn't seem ideal to me ended up shaping my life. At that time I was completely naive and genuine with no expectations. I was just doing something because it felt like the right and natural thing to do. I think that's important.

What does a typical day look like?

Finding the balance between spending time with the people I love, being immersed and inspired by nature, learning, researching and obviously working!

What's your workstation setup?

Where do you go to get inspired?

I tend to look outside of what’s happening in the design world, building analogies and connections between different industries is my playground to generate ideas. In general, people are always an incredible source of inspiration and vibrant cities are a natural stage for that. However, during the pandemic, I decided to move to the countryside and I started to experience nature in a different way which has definitely inspired me and the way I am thinking about ideas.

What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?

“SuperYou”, is an AR costume arts experiment by Universal Everything. Aim your camera at your super friend, see them transform and swipe to change costumes.

"Rememory", is a next-generation content platform that enables users to shoot, edit, and view 3D video

"Trip VR", is generating psychedelic art experiences based on music in Virtual Reality.

What pieces of work are you most proud of?

In the last year, it's definitely Jadu. Jadu builds interactive musical experiences that bring artist's visual worlds to life using augmented reality. Powered by Microsoft, the production uses 106 cameras to capture the artist as they perform and reproduce them as a photorealistic hologram. Fans can download 15-20 second holographic performances on the Jadu app for free to generate content that looks like the artist and the fan are in the same space together. It was fun watching Lil Was X duet with a fan and his hologram on TikTok.

What design challenges do you face at your company?

Many! But two things I have been particularly careful about since I started freelancing are learning to say "No" and learning to promote my work.

What music do you listen to while designing?

Any advice for ambitious designers?

It's important to understand the role of a designer in contemporary society. Study the history of design and learn from those who did this before us, scroll less and investigate more about the whos and whys of people who made particular design decisions, network and bring something back to the community, be friendly, collaborate. I see many people focusing on improving their skills and learning tools (which is definitely important) but completely lacking the ability to communicate their ideas. As designers, we are more and more sitting on tables where decisions are made, and we need to be able to speak the language of the people we are talking to.

Anything you want to promote or plug?

I am slowly building a small Discord community with friends and all the talented people I’ve had the chance to work with. We discuss the present and the future of the industry. If you are interested in exploring topics like interaction design, speculative futures, blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, immersive and spatial, NFTs, visual design, 3D, and everything in between - that's the place. I also created a small job board with selected interesting gigs around the world. Together is better.

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