Ideas made visible.
Cut paper, scanned, 2026.
Independent designer and art director creating identities, digital experiences, and visual stories with a clear point of view.
Selected work
01—06
Six projects across identity, editorial, digital, packaging, campaign — and one that nobody asked for.
Good design should leave a trace.
I care about clarity first — work that says one thing well. Then curiosity: the detour that turns a correct answer into a memorable one.
Context decides the rest. A mark for a ceramics studio and an interface for a sound archive shouldn’t look like cousins. What they share is attention to the small things people notice on the second look.
From first thought to final form.
- Brand identityNames in use, marks, type and colour systems that hold together from a business card to a building.
- Digital designWebsites and interfaces with a point of view — fast, accessible, and designed to be explored rather than skimmed.
- Art directionCampaigns, shoots and visual languages that give a single idea enough room to be remembered.
- EditorialMagazines, books and reports with a grid you can feel and a pace that makes long reading pleasant.
- Creative experimentationSelf-initiated type, colour and motion studies — the place where most of the good ideas start.
Form follows feeling.
An identity that behaves like the objects it represents: warm, slightly irregular, and made to be handled every day.
- Forma is an imagined two-person studio throwing tableware by hand. They needed a name in use, a mark that could be stamped into clay, and packaging that felt as considered as the pieces inside.
- Creative direction, identity design
- Visual identity, Packaging, Print
- Most craft identities either go rustic and generic or polished and cold. The work had to feel handmade without looking amateur, and survive being pressed into wet clay at 12 millimetres wide.
- I started at the wheel, not the screen — photographing bowls drying upside down and tracing their profiles. Stacked, those silhouettes became the F.
- A compact system of mark, stamp, wordmark and pattern that works at the scale of a maker's stamp and a shop window. Every element can be produced with a rubber stamp and one ink colour.
- 2025
Not everything needs a brief.
Sunday-morning studies in type, colour, image-making and motion. Most go nowhere. A few quietly change how I work on everything else.
Curiosity first. Craft always.
- 01
Observe
Every project starts with looking — at the people, the place and the things nobody thought to mention.
- 02
Explore
Many directions, quickly and roughly, until one of them is impossible to ignore.
- 03
Edit
Take away until only what carries the idea is left, then check it still feels alive.
- 04
Deliver
Finished files, clear guidelines and a handover that lets the work keep going without me.
A designer with a soft spot for the details.
I’m Mira Vale, an independent designer and art director in Lisbon. For ten years I’ve worked between studios and on my own, mostly on identities, editorial projects and the occasional website that wanted to be a little stranger than usual.
I work best with small teams who care about what they make. I ask a lot of questions, print everything and keep the rough sketches. This is a fictional demo biography — replace it with your own.
Currently
- Identity for a small natural-wine bar (in progress)
- A self-published book of Glyph Garden letters
- Teaching a short editorial-design workshop
Working principles
Small teams, direct lines. Fewer, better projects. Show the thinking, including the dead ends.
Small observations.
- Design for the second lookThe first look decides if someone stops. The second look decides if they remember.
- On cropping, and what to leave outA crop is a decision about what the viewer doesn't need. It's often the most honest edit.
- Why I still print type specimensScreens flatter type. Paper tells the truth about spacing, weight and rhythm.
Have something
good in mind?
Tell me about it — a new identity, a publication, a website that wants to be explored. Half-formed ideas are welcome.
hello@miravale.studio