Latin American Design Festival

Vania Dale Alvarado reports on the themes of technology and the human touch at LADFEST 2019

For the Argentinian illustrator Daiana Ruiz, attending this year’s Latin American Design Festival (LADFEST) held in Lima, Peru, the future of design concerns the representation of people that don’t necessarily fit into the binary canon of gender. While Andrew Gibbs of The Dieline said that it has to do with a reduction of single-use plastic packaging. “Plastic-free equals guilty free,” was one of the pillars of his lecture.

In contrast, Marc Kremers, the founder of London-based digital agency Future Corp, said, “Your future is in the past”. That expression, which he used to make people reflect on the importance of constantly moving forward, has a connection with the virtual world he’s immersed in, where his avant-garde web designs for brands and bands like Manolo Blahnik and The XX feel like the digital materialization that’s perfectly in sync with the creative’s way of thinking.