December in Madrid

After a lovely long weekend in Porto, it was back to Madrid for me to spend the last few days before Christmas. Much of my time there was taken up doing my last few bits of Christmas shopping, but I also made time to decorate my flat, including adjusting all the LED lights to a new, festive color scheme…

In between getting my second dose of the vaccine and organizing myself ready for my trip back to the UK for Christmas, I spent plenty of evenings with friends, from pizza evenings with Napo to a hilarious evening of ice skating and traditional Chinese food with Luis and Yaewon.

As you can see, the meal consisted of a central heated bowl with three types of broth, in which we dipped a series of different ingredients for varying times so that they were perfectly, freshly cooked. We also had the option of creating a series of sauces and other adornments – it was all delicious and great fun!

The low winter sun makes for the occasional aesthetically pleasing scene despite the cold.

Work has also been quite busy, with plenty of projects to wrap up before the new year and some events to attend to. I can’t go into too much detail, but one was a presentation of a new brand at an international event for one of our clients, and the other included a trip to the headquarters of another to tour their offices and chat about new projects in the pipeline.

The Friday before I flew back to the UK took me to my third and final event, as I’d been asked to give a presentation at Referentum Talks, a celebration which brought together design students and Madrid’s most important design studios. There I gave a talk about how I went from design student to design director, talked through how we work at Erretres, and explained the process of our branding for Seedtag.

Here I am, probably making a joke about how I was going to do the talk in English.

It was lovely to be back representing Erretres on the design scene after the last talk I gave just before the pandemic, and it was a fitting end to a busy month of work before I flew back to England for a big family reunion – but more on that in the next post!