'My artist alter ego gave me a purpose': a day in the life of Carlos Oliveras Colom

In 2025, I became freelance after being a full-time employee. I partly landed myself here after being part of a tech layoff in 2024, but also because people I have worked with in the past keep reaching out for help.

Some days I have my Designer hat on. This looks like working on creating visual concepts for what a brand could look like and how it can be applied in real-life scenarios while keeping the brand cohesive with clear messaging. And it can also look like helping someone find solutions on how to refresh their company wordmark. Other days, I switch to my Illustration hat, where I’m helping create a brand character, figuring out their expressions and how they live within the brand and platform.

I also get to wear a very fun hat – my lettering one, where I get to play with letters and create very unique and expressive letter compositions. This is either for my personal practice or for clients.

I started my design career in 2014, which was a very different time in my life. Back then, it all revolved around the irony of who would hire me after I graduated, while at the same time needing 2 years of experience to start working fresh out of college. So, I took production designer jobs, then I freelanced a bit in the entertainment industry, designing for a big red carpet event, and then I eventually stumbled into advertising for a big tech company. Back then, I’d take jobs to sustain myself and be an independent adult, rather than to fully satisfy my creative ambitions. During this time, I was still figuring out who I was as a designer.

When you’re in school, you come up with solutions that benefit a project; when you are working for a company, you work within their brand guidelines. While working for a company, I never had time to explore who I was until I was able to remove myself from the work environment. This is when I learnt that my identity is not my 9 am-5 pm job, I am more than that. This realisation catapulted me into exploring more about myself, my crafts, and tapping into my past, which all led me to create my artist alter ego, “DonCarrrlos.”

Simple answer: Giving what I do for fun (and now clients) a name like “DonCarrrlos” helped me compartmentalise. My artist alter ego saved me and gave me a purpose.

I went to college for Graphic and Interactive Communications, and at that time, I thought everything I was in high school needed to be in the past because it didn’t align with what I was starting to become. But the funny thing I later realised is that you can be more than one thing in life!

This is something I think about often when trying to understand myself more. My surroundings in the island of Puerto Rico definitely had a huge impact. I always remember my mom driving me to school in her red little car as I looked out the window at the graffiti tags one after the other and murals over concrete walls buried within the lush green wild vegetation. So the colourful and expressive letters that defy the norms or traditionally beautiful typography full of weight and presence I attribute to street art.

This is so random, but I used to go work every summer with my stepfather and help him with his vending machines business, because “in this family there are no lazy people and we all have to work”. I hated it, but what I didn’t hate was being exposed to candies, chips and sodas, all day every day. I was immersed in this world of highly popular and consumed brands, that had the most vibrant logos, fun typographic choices, and there was color everywhere. I think this definitely drew me even more to drawing letters from an early age on the back of any cardboard or M&M’s boxes I could find.

Inspiration is everywhere! But it’s also tricky, I feel the more you look at something, the more you are influenced by it. If I’m working on a DonCarrrlos piece, I try to work from what I already have in me. I try to avoid being heavily inspired by something specific or an individual, so the piece I create can be the most authentic version of me as possible.

I’m always trying to look for interesting shapes and their relationships to one another. I live for curvaceous forms & smooth lines, but also contrast & juxtapositions of total opposites. Some things that I enjoy looking at are: anything from architecture, fashion, furniture design, ceramics, flowers, insects, to anything sci-fi.

The trickiest thing for me these days is time. So much is happening, and everything is moving fast, so it can feel like you are always running to catch up. Trying to do Design, Lettering, and build my social media presence (since it’s what it brings in the jobs) all at once is a lot. Then, when you take a break, you feel like you are falling behind even more. Managing what you commit to and setting boundaries with yourself and clients helps.

In terms of a specific work challenge, in the same vein of time, a lot of people want projects done for yesterday. So the way I have resolved it is – the quality and amount of the work you receive will be a reflection of the time and budget allocated for the project. We are not magicians. I feel clients sometimes need to be more reasonable and value a creative’s time and not treat it as a last-minute step.

Oooh! I love the campaign I made for Amazon Music for the month of Pride. Every year they select a visual artist to represent the community and also get to illustrate very queer, and daring colorful art. I think that project solidified a lot of things for me.

It made me feel like what I had been working for night and day was not in vain, that my work was valid and enough to occupy spaces that big, and the fact that I could proudly represent a heavily marginalised community that I am part of around the world was the cherry on top. They were one of my first big clients that I took all on my own, so even navigating all the details and relationships with a client were enlightening and humbling. So I’m proud of myself that I did that too. I learned a lot during this process which I was going through as I also worked full time as a designer. Not recommending this kids, it was extremely exhausting. But some opportunities are too good to let go.

My top tool must be my iPad, it’s always around me; on my desk, my bed, travelling with me. Soon, I may start calling it my boyfriend.

There is something great about drawing for hours and seeing that your hand is not covered in graphite and your drawing is not stained everywhere, or that you don’t have to clean mounds of eraser crumbs.

Though I will always love paint brushes, the classics. They allow me to let loose, have fun and go as big as the canvas allows me to.

Something the industry needs to improve on in my POV is to pay artists for their experience, their time and ALL the many iterations they like to ask for. I hate seeing people working on big projects for very little pay just for “exposure” or the “opportunity”. Our time is valuable, and many of us have spent years and decades honing the craft and learning to be able to deliver quality projects.

I also wish there was more transparency in terms of how much projects are quoted for and even salaries. I feel like there is always this stigma in asking other people about it. Or quoting too high and losing the client. When I started doing client work as a lettering artist/ illustrator, it was very hard to get a sense of what projects should cost.

Ooh boy! This is a tiny question with a loaded answer. My gut reaction is that… what I do as part of my personal projects is not to impress anyone, not to get more likes. It’s simply to express myself, my bottled emotions, and just explore forms and shapes and see what I can do with my imagination.

I don’t need a computer to do that for me. I know what I want, and eventually, I get to what I want to accomplish. I get satisfaction from knowing I created with my knowledge and the development of my craft.

Probs a couple of cliché things… “start what you want to do now, don’t overthink it, follow your gut, but most importantly have fun”

Once I started studying design, I stopped being the crafty teenager who enjoyed painting anything in his own way, drawing letters on walls and Sharpie on my friends’ arms. I felt that to be a true designer, everything needed to be perfect, and my past needed to stay in the past. Sometimes I feel like I wasted time. In 5-6 years, I could have made so much progress in my artistic journey. But you live and you learn.

Find out more about Carlos Oliveras Colom.