Pepe Gimeno elected winner of the 2020 National Design Award

Pepe Gimeno was born in Valencia in 1951. From 1970, the year in which he graduated from the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades of Valencia, until his incorporation to Col.lectiu Voramar in 1985, Pepe Gimeno works in different advertising agencies such as Leo Burnett in Madrid and Pivot Publicidad in Valencia.

Later, he shared a studio with the NUC group formed by Vicent Martínez, Lola Castelló and Daniel Nebot. During this time, his artistic activity is the subject of various exhibitions and awards. He presents the series Pensant en la dona and El pintor y la Pintura and in 1978 he received the Antonio del Rincón National Drawing Award.

In 1986 he shared a studio with Cándido Pérez carrying out packaging and graphic identity projects. The result of this period is the logo of the Municipal Transport Company of Valencia, which is still in force after more than thirty years. The following year he establishes his own studio and specializes in graphic communication. He carries out corporate identity, signage and publications work, among which the editorial line for IMPIVA and “la palmera”, a tourist symbol of the Valencian Community, stand out.

In 1989 he was appointed president of the Association of Designers of the Valencian Community (ADCV), a position he held until 1992.

In 1990 he created the Gimeno y Lavernia studio together with Nacho Lavernia. From this period emerged such iconic projects as the brand of the Valencian Courts, the Bank of Valencia and the IMPIVA network. He teaches graphic design classes for three years at the CEU San Pablo design school in Valencia. During this period, he collaborates intensely in projects for the dissemination and promotion of design. He participates in the Casa Barcelona project of the Barcelona 92 ​​Cultural Olympiad, in the DOM project, in the Expo 92 in Seville and in the Carmen project of the Verona Abitare il Tempo Fair. And finally, he is part of the 20 Valencian Designers exhibition at the Institut Valencià d ’Art Modern (IVAM).

In 1995 he created Pepe Gimeno Graphic Project and moved to the new Godella studio (Valencia). He experiences edits the book Pepe Gimeno, 25 years of graphic design. This publication obtains the gold medal of the American publication Creativity. He designs the FF Pepe typeface, which was awarded the Typeface Design Award in 2001 by the Type Director's Club of New York, the equivalent of an Oscar in typeface.

In 2001 he began to prepare the Grafía Callada project, an experimental graphics project with which he tries to separate content and form, in a book that deals with writing and signs, but in which, paradoxically, no written text appears.

In 2002 he won the restricted competition called by the Ministry of the Presidency, among the most relevant designers at the national level, for the creation of the logo of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union 2002.

In 2004 Grafía Callada was exhibited at the Institu Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM). It is one of the first solo exhibitions of a graphic designer in an art museum. That same year he gave the Safari Residual workshop in the summer courses organized by the George Pompidou Center and the Vitra Design Foundation at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in France. This one takes as its base of work the experimental project Grafía Callada.

Years later, in 2015, this same project is presented in the US at the Type Director’s Club in New York in a solo exhibition. The itinerary of the exhibition was completed in 2016 with two exhibitions at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago and at the CCE Spanish Cultural Center in Miami.

In 2015 he began to teach at Domestika the online course in Spanish, English, Portuguese and German, on The Laws of Visual Perception: Unit, Weight, Balance and Movement, with enormous success. More than 11,000 students from fifty countries have followed the courses. The comments are, in a very high percentage, very complimentary.

His teaching and dissemination work has been reflected in more than one hundred participations in juries, congresses, workshops, workshops and conferences, given at universities, design schools, congresses and professional associations throughout Spain, Mexico, Germany, Hungary and France. . He has also collaborated in the dissemination of design by participating in another hundred group exhibitions whose routes have crossed different continents.

At the beginning of 2016, he made the decision to create a new company to integrate as partners the five members of the team with whom he has collaborated, in some cases, for three decades. Gimeno Gràfic is a new project.

Gimeno + Guitart is an international architectural studio working in Spain and United States in collaboration with a team from offices in Barcelona, Tarragona, Bilbao, Sevilla y Buffalo.