Jose Maria Gonzalez-Ecija on why your roots can be the best design tool — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Every Saturday as a child, Jose Maria stood in front of supermarket shelves with his dad, comparing products and choosing one over another without quite knowing why. He calls it his first education in branding. Now an independent brand and web designer who has worked at AnalogFolk, Dyson and Paseo Studio, Jose works directly with companies and also collaborates with design studios as an external creative partner. He builds identities by listening to what a client mentions in passing, the details that turn out to be everything. To keep his work distinctive, he draws on a private archive of references that do not trend, featuring sweet wrappers from his hometown of Écija, Holy Week crests and the texture of his grandfather’s painting. In our conversation, Jose explains the Toyota technique he uses to reach a brand’s essence, how that archive is a working tool, and why he wants design to earn its place in people’s lives.
TBI How are things going?
JMG Things are going very well, and I am happy to be here. Grateful to do work that creates value: for companies looking for an authentic voice and expression, but also for people and communities, which matters just as much.
TBI How did you get into brand and web design?
JMG When I was a kid, my dad and I would go to the supermarket every Saturday. We would spend ages in front of the shelves, comparing products and choosing one over another without ever fully understanding why. It was a ritual, and looking back, it was my first education in branding.
Later, studying graphic design, I understood those products were competing for attention through typography, colour, layout and imagery, each one expressing a personality to connect with a certain kind of audience. That is what made me fall in love with branding – the idea that a clear, honest identity can make a brand feel like someone you recognise and trust, not just something you buy. That supermarket shelf is still the best analogy I have for any market. Every brand occupies a position, and my job is to make sure the right people see it, understand it, and choose it.
Web design came later. It feels like the ecosystem where the brand lives and performs, so I design sites as a natural extension of the brand. But the brand always comes first.
TBI You worked at AnalogFolk, Dyson and Paseo Studio before going freelance. What stayed with you?
JMG Three different ways of reading a brief. At AnalogFolk, I learned to think in digital experiences and to work inside large teams. At Dyson, I saw how engineering reaches into visual communication – very meticulous. At Paseo, the work was faster, with a strong culture of taste and deep branding knowledge. Each one gave me a different angle to read a brand from, and that matters because the most interesting thing about a client is rarely on the surface. You need those angles to find it.
The making runs from nine to five. The thinking does not.
TBI What does your day-to-day look like?
JMG Most of the work happens before I open any design tool. I spend a lot of time understanding the client, their market, their competitors, what they can and cannot do, and what they want to become. I ask a lot of questions to gather as many clues as possible. Only then do I distil all of that into the brand’s essence, and the essence into an identity.
The making runs from nine to five. The thinking does not. And in the end, what a client pays for is not the final file. It is the thinking behind it, and the clarity and positioning that thinking will give them in the market.
TBI You talk a lot about listening to clients. Where did that come from?
JMG This industry carries a lot of ego. Designers know more about design than clients, but the client knows far more about their product, their culture and their audience. Listening is the bridge between those two things, and ignoring it is where a lot of work goes wrong.
I love a technique that comes from Toyota, the Five Whys. You keep asking why until you reach something the client has not yet put into words, the real essence, what makes the brand authentic rather than just presentable. I do not listen to be polite. I listen because what makes a brand special is usually hidden in something the client says in passing.
MetTathione proved that clearly. The brand comes from Asia, from a cultural context very different from my own. Deep conversations were the only way to understand how it needed to be perceived by its audience. We gave it the sophistication and closeness to its people it never had before.
TBI Everyone pulls from the same references on Pinterest, Are.na, etc. How do you avoid that?
JMG I treat those platforms as a way to see what is already on the shelf. Like walking the supermarket aisle, they show me what is on display, what feels familiar, what visual language a category has developed. But if we all pick from the same display, the work ends up looking the same.
The interesting work happens in a narrow zone. It has to feel familiar enough to be understood, but different enough to be noticed. That is the space I try to stay in. So I use these platforms to understand the category, the shared visual language of a market. But I finish somewhere else, in a personal archive of design that does not trend. Packaging from my hometown, signage from trips I have made, printed things from my childhood, small details from everyday life. Things made for real people, not for designers. I use the shelf to stay legible, and the archive to stay myself.
TBI When did you realise your own memories could be design material?
JMG Slowly, and then all at once. I noticed how many of us were reaching for the same references, and how quickly that makes work blur together. That was a clear sign I needed to look elsewhere.
Around that time, I discovered the work of Ramdane Touhami, who builds brands that are deliberately out of step with trends (and far stronger because of it). That gave me permission to look at what was already close to me – the sweet wrappers from Écija, my hometown; the crests from Holy Week processions; the way my grandfather painted. None of it was made for designers. It was made for real people, which is exactly what makes it honest.
And that is the key point. Every designer’s personal archive will be different. That is precisely what makes it valuable.
TBI How does a personal reference end up in a project?
JMG It depends entirely on what the project needs. Sometimes the reference is direct. Sometimes it lives in a single detail that most people will not consciously notice.
La Cuadrilla is a good example. The name comes from Andalusian culture (a group of people who come together). The client wanted that feeling of community, but without the usual folkloric clichés. So I made typography the primary tool, working with Romie by Claude Type, a typeface that subtly echoes old Andalusian religious iconography. I kept the palette in black and white to reduce noise and evoke archival photography. From the beginning, the brand was easy to recognise and said clearly what it stood for – something rooted in the past, reframed in a contemporary language.
TBI If every designer carries an archive like that, why do so few use it?
JMG Because it is hard. We are constantly pushed by the trends we are bombarded with every day, and a reference from your archive is not something you simply drop into a project. You have to understand what the project actually needs, then judge how much of the reference should show so it feels intentional but never forced. An archive is not about copying your references. It is about having them as a resource that lets you reach ideas you could not arrive at any other way. It makes the work more specific, more personal, and much harder to replicate.
The best work changes how people see the world.
TBI What would you like to see more or less of in the industry?
JMG More work that earns its place in people’s lives, instead of just competing for their attention. The best work changes how people see the world, not only how they see a product.
It’s tricky, because in the end we all need to pay the bills. But I try to work with companies that mean something, that have a real raison d'être. Lifenew is a good example, a second-hand brand I worked on. Instead of selling each garment as a cheap item, we presented it as the result of human effort and resources. A t-shirt wasn’t just cotton; it was cotton picked, transported and transformed by people. So the brand spoke through the objects themselves, illustrated as if each one had something to say. The point was to make buying second-hand feel like a conscious, empathetic choice, not just a cheaper one. I don’t see meaning as the opposite of commercial work. Done well, it’s often what makes a brand worth choosing at all.
That's also why I take on social projects when I can. (Ver)bos, made with the Council of Écija, plays on ver (to see) and verbos (verbs). It turns positive everyday actions into illustrations, putting those verbs on a pedestal so they stay present in daily life. Work like that reminds me what design is really for – a tool to move people toward something better, not just toward checkout.
TBI What do you do when a project stalls or you hit a block?
JMG I go back to the client and the archive. More questions for the client, usually about what they have not said yet, and another pass through my own references. If I am still stuck, I sit down with a blank page and a pencil anyway. The block rarely survives that.
TBI Was there a moment that changed how you work?
JMG It was not one project. It was a shift in how I understand design.
I used to think a strong designer just needed a strong personality in their work to be noticeable. At some point, mostly through things outside of work, I understood that just my taste is not the brief. The brief is the brand in front of me, the people it needs to reach, and the problem it is trying to solve. My job is to find the best answer for that specific problem, which is often not the answer I would choose for myself.
Toltek is a good example. The straightforward move for a tech brand is to lean fully into the digital aesthetic. But Toltek's real essence was not about the technology alone; it was about the balance between data and human collaboration. So I built the identity around that balance – an art direction based on human interaction, with warm tones as a secondary palette to soften the usual cold tech look, and a monogram built from a grid, like pixels or units coming together, but with the forms rounded to feel human rather than mechanical. It was the honest answer to what the brand needed to say, and it is what makes Toltek immediately legible in a market full of look-alikes.
Since then, I have treated my own practice like a brand I keep revising, never settling into one style.
TBI What kind of client brings out your best work?
JMG Someone who understands their business but has not yet found how to speak it out loud. They know what they do and why it matters; they need a partner to listen, challenge, and turn that into something visible and coherent. It is similar when a studio brings me in. I am rarely there to execute a decision that has already been made. I am there to help decide what the brand needs to say first.
I do not tie myself to one industry, and that is deliberate. Crossing sectors keeps the work fresh and stops it from hardening into a formula, which is the real risk of specialising. It also lets me balance the commercial projects that keep my work profitable with the social, ethical ones that keep me stimulated. That balance is what makes the practice sustainable, for the business and for my mind.
My best work never comes from a category or a famous name. It comes from a real intention and from someone who would rather stand out on the shelf than blend into it.