We recently connected with KARLA PASTEN and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, KARLA thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?

I would say that the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me is that people trusted me all along the way. In my first job, I was just starting with lettering and my boss of that time trusted in me and gave me real projects in which I should apply my new abilities, gaining a lot of experience in this area and building a portfolio. On my second job my art director Elias Mule and after him, Jorge Mercado saw how much work I was putting into learning and always trusted me with custom wordmarks for our branding projects. Also, I was very lucky since Elias and Jorge were also trained in lettering and typeface design which made it even better for me because they pointed out things to improve in my work. And lastly, my friend Raul Urias, an excellent Mexican illustrator, opened for me a lot of new opportunities that I will talk about more later.

KARLA, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do? How did you started in your industry? What project are you most proud of and what sets you apart from others?

Hi, I’m Karla Pasten, you can also call me Mixtli, I’m a graphic designer from Hidalgo, Mexico. I’m passionate about typography and illustration. I specialize in branding, packaging, illustration, and typeface design. I am part of the Times New Woman movement, an initiative to empower Spanish-speaking women interested in letters. I currently collaborate with the design agency Mucca from New York.

I would say that as a graphic designer, I started in my third year of college but as a lettering artist it all began in 2019, 3 years after my graduation. It was right after leaving my job at a design agency in Mexico City that I realized that I didn’t want that kind of life and what I really wanted was to do typeface design, lettering, and Illustration. I started to post personal work on my Instagram profile and from that, a lot of people started to follow me. Also, I traveled a lot during that year, making as many friends in the industry as possible, assisting to design conferences around Mexico, and really opening myself from a shell I didn’t know I was living in. I would say that thanks to that a lot of people that I looked for when I was a student started to notice me and eventually we became friends, opening for me a lot of unknown paths that I didn’t know existed in the industry. I would say that the person who really pushed me in the industry was Raul Urias, giving me a lot of opportunities to expand my portfolio and to work with really cool brands.

That’s why the work I am most proud of is the title of TORO which I designed for Raul Urías’ book, which is a compilation of the graphic work from his last 6 years (2014 – 2020). It shows a selection of personal and commercial works in more than 200 color pages and a series of sketches. As one of my dearest friends, I cherish this project a lot, and is the one most people know me about.

Another project I’m the most proud of is my typeface revival called Sonnet inspired by M. Elizabeth Colwell work the Colwell Handletter from American Type Founders in 1916. I cherish this project the most since I did a really exhausting research on Colwell’s work and from a lot of woman typeface designers from 1900-1960 from where we only know 11 woman typeface designers by name.

I also think that what differentiates my work from others is the way in which I combine illustration with lettering; I always wanted to be a conceptual artist for movies or cartoons when I started college and that’s why I trained myself a lot on composition. Especially since I can’t imagine a lot of things in my mind, all I can see are memories but not really Imagine something from zero. That’s why relating so much to composition, rhythm, contrast, all the design principles push a lot of my work on lettering. Specifically color theory which I was taught during college, I got so immersed in this practice that I would say that this takes a big role in my personal work. On the other hand, I find that I get bored very easily with conventional letter forms, I am always trying to explore new forms and integrate different concepts into common words, especially playing with dichotomies in my conceptual thinking when making personal lettering pieces.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In 2019 while I was building my portfolio and my audience on social media I landed a job at a design agency in New York that would take me to live there for 18 months. It was a dream I never knew I could have and make true because of how wild it was from someone who was born into a middle-class family in Mexico. I went to all the visa interviews and moved city and I was filled with dreams and hopes for this new life. That’s when COVID-19 happened in 2020, I was in New York for only 2 weeks and a half, and the design agency decided to take me back to Mexico, and gladly I took the offer since the situation was very frightening. Then again, I was back in Mexico with shattered dreams and zero motivation. I went back to zero on the checkboard, so I did what was the best thing I knew to do, and that was letting go of all my fears and emotions over my personal work.

I would say that the pandemic brought a lot of new opportunities for a lot of people like me, a lot of typeface design BIPOC scholarships started to appear and that’s how I applied to Juan Villanueva’s Display Type Design course. I got selected and that’s how I started to get trained in this area. Then Letterform Archives launched a scholarship to form a group formed by only BIPOC students, I applied and got selected for Introduction to Modern Type Design by Graham Bradley and lastly, Type West a post-graduate certificate program in type design established in San Francisco opened an online group in 2021 and gave a full scholarship to study the program, I applied and got selected with a full scholarship. 2020 was a year full of ups and downs, but what I learned from it is to take action on what we can do at that moment when at your lowest the best thing to do is to swim up. Also in Mexico, we have an excellent typeface design community and we used to connect together via Zoom and to typecookers and stream them on the Facebook group of the Letrastica Festival profile. A lot of fun, a lot of drawing and full of new people.

Eventually, while I was doing the Type West program in April of 2021, Mucca Design contacted me to do some freelance projects, two days after presenting my project for the 1st term of Type West I started working for them and I continue doing so.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I would say that in college there is a lot of rivalry around creative people and a lot of jealousy but I would recommend stopping doing this to the new generations. Graphic Design is a huge area, most of the people you study with will not focus on the same thing as you do, and even if it’s the case two people would end up doing projects completely in a different way. What helped me the most in this industry was to make a lot of friends on my journey and never see them as rivals, especially in typeface design. It’s a difficult area to study without any formal training, It’s not impossible but it requires a lot of investment in time and money. If the community could free the new generations from these toxic traits in the industry and focus more on what people can learn, a lot of new designers can emerge from places we can’t imagine with a new and fresh view of what surrounds us. I choose to focus on what can I do for people who see me as an example of “success” and share as much knowledge I can with them, from encouraging them to take risks, to do more personal work, to thinking more about what they are creating. In my personal time, I do portfolio and resume reviews to try to help people land the job they want, even from how to answer interview questions or what benefits a job must give you by law. I would like to give back the help I received from a lot of people and I think we should talk more about this kind of thing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mixtli.mx
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/mixtli.mx
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/karla-pasten/
• Other: https://www.behance.net/mixtli_mx

Image Credits
Portrait of Elizabeth Colwell. Image from The Graphic Arts, March 1913.