Portfolio Design for Play

Pedro Cabral dos Santos

Design Portfolio 2021

Me SmarTomb

Introduction - p. 4

Lamp Design and Lighting Concept

Product Design - June 2018, p. 6

Product Design - March 2019, p. 8

3D Tiles

Product/Ceramic Design - December 2019, p. 16

PARS

Product/Furniture Design - June 2020, p. 18

Cantinho da Rosa - flowershop

Interior/Equipment Design - December 2020, p. 22

Graphic/Campaign Design - October 2019, p. 10

Graphic/Editorial Design - December 2019, p. 12

Lagaffe - Ceramic Sound Amplifier

Product/Ceramic Design - December 2019, p. 14

Digital Morphogenesis Messing Around Other Work

3D Modeling - January 2021, p. 28 Illustration Series - p. 30 Experiments - p. 32

About Me

Introduction

I’m Pedro from Portugal and I’m 20 years old, about to turn 21 in the 6th of April. I live near Lisbon in a town called Paço d’Arcos, Oeiras. I come from an artistic background and some of my family members are and were designers, architects or artists. I’m currently in my last semester of Design Bachelor in the Architecture School of the University of Lisbon (Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de Lisboa). It’s a course that combines several areas of Design like Product, Graphic and Interiors. Before college I attended an Artistic High School also in Lisbon called António Arroio, where I specialized in Product Design.

My design process functions in multiple steps. I do intensive researches before any project, but I feel the most important phase is the sketching, this is where I will visualize the many possible outcomes of what the final result will look like, it’s like having in front of you multiple doors opened to multiple timelines and I can only choose one.

My main inspirations come from the great Design minds in Portugal like Professor Daciano da Costa (1930-2005), Cottinelli Telmo (1897-1940) and Pedro Silva Dias (1963), but there are multiple foreign designers I also look up to like Dieter Rams (1932), Marcele Breuer (1902-1981) and Charles Eames (1907-1978).

I´m applying to go to Denmark because I feel that as a future designer, we should have contact with other cultures, other points of view, and I’ve always been interest in Nordic Design. Lego and IKEA for example have been present in my life since I could remember, like most of my friends I’ve always enjoyed playing with Lego and as kids we made competitions on who could collect more minifigures. I hope Denmark will be one of many stops in my designer journey.

In this portfolio you will find some of my best projects from the last 5 years, from different areas. I hope you find this content interesting and appealing, and I’m open to any further discussion about me or my portfolio.

Pedro Cabral dos Santos

Lamp Design and Lighting Concept

1. Render of the Object 4.

This Project was made for my final evaluation in Product Design in Art School Antonio Arroio. This piece was planned to be an homage for CCB (Centro Cultural de Belém) a contemporary art center in Lisbon. The architecture of this place is defined by very rigid lines and big squared volumes, as if it was made by blocks.

3. Final study sketch

at 1:10

SmarTomb

The SmarTomb has a pretty self-explanatory name, it’s a tomb for your smartphone. The briefing defined a main purpose for us, Portuguese design students, to stop using our cellphones as a tool of “research” during design classes. The professors wanted us to research in an “old-school” way, searching in books, sketching, taking ideas directly from our brains and not from “pinterest”.

The final product became something like a puzzle box. The cellphone is placed inside the tomb and cannot come out the way in entered. The user has to figure out how the box opens and then he can have his cellphone back, this process alone can take several minutes for the first-time users, and about a minute for the long--time user. It forces you to spend time away from your cellphone.

This object is the nearest thing to Design for Play I’ve created.

3 Little Heroes collection

Graphic/Editorial Design - December 2019

This book collection was made to celebrate the heroic actions of 3 little fictional heroes against 3 mighty foes, Peter Pan, Bilbo Baggins and Alice against Captain Hook, Smaug the Dragon and the Queen of Hearts respectively.

I’m calling them little but only in the physical sense, because all three represent values that transcend everything. These three heroes define that heroic actions are not only made by big folk, and “even the smallest person can change the course of the future”.

In the covers I decided to represent the enemy that each hero will confront, a way to warn the young reader that there will be evil doers that are going to try to hurt our heroes. In the editorial part of it I decided to give a more classical look to the layout using mainly Serif-fonts and making illustration that were inspired in old book engravings.

22. Book spines side by side

He published his first novel, Better Dead, in 1887.

Barrie soon had a string of popular novels set in Scotland, including A Window in Thrums (1889).

The famous character of Peter Pan first appeared in the 1902 book The Little White Bird. Two years later, his play Peter Pan premiered on the London stage and became great success. Audiences were drawn in the fantastical tale of the flying boy who never grew up and his adventures in Neverland with the Darling children. Barrie also wrote a book based on the play called Peter and Wendy, which was published in 1911.

The book earned raves from critics.

James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland. After graduating from Edinburgh University in 1882, Barrie worked as journalist.

Peter Pan Book Cover

CERAMIC SOUND AMPLIFIER DESIGN • PEDRO CABRAL DOS SANTOS

Lagaffe is a ceramic sound amplifier for cellphones, an unplugged amplifier. The briefing was pretty basic and simple, to be able to play music on your cellphone when there were no Bluetooth speakers around. This implied an immersive research on sound and the way it works.

After studying absorption and reflection I started looking for a form, and interesting ways to relate to the cellphone. The choice of ceramic materials was obvious, because it’s one of the least absorptive materials. The ceramic piece is mounted on a wooden base which elevates the amplifier in order to propagate the sound in several directions, plus the different openings also help doing that.

The choice of name was in homage to Gaston Lagaffe, famous franco-belgian comic book character, and his “music” instrument called Gaffophone.

LAGAFFE é um amplificador de som de cerâmica sem recurso a eletrónica. O produto resulta da conjugação do Imaterial (som) com o Material (cerâmica e madeira).

A peça foi concebida em faiança e vidrada de diferentes cores. O suporte de madeira de pinho feito mão cria uma elevação à peça cerâmica criando um resultado de som mais amplo.

É uma peça que no seu conjunto cria um peso visual tornando-se inevitável ao olhar e à tentação da experimentação.

3D Tiles

Product/Ceramic Design - December 2019

These tiles are a modern take on old Spanish-Moorish tiles, and minimalist take. Spanish-Moorish tiles were a classical ornament choice for Iberian interiors, with many examples still standing today on Portugal like Palácio de Sintra.

These tiles take some of the 2D forms of these old tiles and extrudes them, transporting them to another dimension, a more 3-Dimensional aspect to it.

Any tile is compatible with one another, being able to connect in any of the four sides. Using different tiles creates different patterns, more fluid and organic patterns, with less symmetry.

To create patterns, we can have different material tiles, combining different techniques such as the classical casting ceramic tiles and laser cut acrylic and wooden tiles.

PARS

Product/Furniture Design - June 2020

Pars is the Latin word for party and this project was started in the break of the Covid-19 Pandemic. With lockdowns and restrictions, we all had the need to take back social encounters, and so PARS is the embodiment of that desire. It’s mainly a bar, an object, an encounter point to attract groups of people.

It was designed to be used for gatherings or parties inside or outside. It’s equipped with many compartments, such as a large one for storing drinks, others to store glasses and cup and other utensils related to bars. It also has a built-in Bluetooth speaker and storge for collapsible individual benches.

It is built in a modular way divided in three major parts that can come apart in order to have an easier transportation from inside to outside.

It has a contrast nature, in the colors of different types of wood and it is like a Transformer, the object in its assembled state is different from its transformed state.

PARS pode ser um móvel de interiores, servindo de bar para guardar e servir bebidas como pode ser transportado para o exterior de maneira a organizar uma festa para um pequeno grupo de pessoas. Oferece bebidas e música. É lúdico e divertido, com bastante espaço de arrumação para copos, bebidas e até gelo.

Cantinho da Rosa - flowershop

Interior/Equipment Design - December 2020

The briefing for this project was to pick an interior space, a commercial establishment that was in bad state and care and improve this space not only in redecoration, but the main purpose was to design equipment for the space itself.

Cantinho da Rosa is a flowershop near Lisbon with 20 years of business, but has achieved a point of no return, has gone deep into chaos with no criteria of organization.

My project was mainly based on form and materials, I wanted organic forms that could live together with plants and flowers, with natural and sustainable materials like ceramics and cork.

The base of it all is concrete with the other materials placed on top.

The main equipment I designed were the vertical ceramic vases, placed on top of each other and created an interesting wall about 3 meters tall. To contrast this wall, I placed on the opposite one vertical flower vases made from cork.

All these forms and materials live in harmony with all the flora present in this shop.

Digital Morphogenesis

This was a pretty fun project, and the main theme was to research nature and the way things are built in nature and replicate such techniques in a 3D modeler. Create a Morphogenesis but on a digital basis.

The different sea animals served more like training sessions. The Eagle’s Head was the final project.

Messing Around was another fun project to do, was more like a series than a project.

The inspirations came from both the real world and my crazy mind, and this is the result of such collision.

A recurrent theme were the Caretos de Podence, a carnival costume worn in traditional northern Portuguese town of Podence, where every man dress like this in carnival when they reach the age of 18. It’s a celebration of adulthood and a farewell of childhood.

This combined with crazy aliens that pop into my head results on a madhouse of cartoons and doodles.

Other work

Experiments

In these final pages I decided to show some experimentations and other secondary projects I did in the last few years. From Lego builds to drawings, serigraphy and collages, I hope this shows I can do a great variety of things.

Obrigado Thank You