Teo Sandigliano is the creative director of WeVux, a design-oriented blog that aims to provide everyday inspirational and creative contents from different fields all around the world. In his exclusive interview with LocalBini, Teo discusses his passion for creativity and design, as well as his experience with WeVux.
1. Could you please share your passion with us?
Well, the truth is, I have so many passions that I would need a 48h day to be able to devote time to them all. I love creativity and the way it manifests itself in architecture, art, cinema, music. My passions are what drive my interest in other activities such as carpentry, graphic design, drums, video-making…so many things. I am also totally in love with nature and plants.
2. Would you say you fulfil your passion for a living?
As you can imagine, I try very hard to pursue my interests both through and in parallel to my work. I define myself as hyperactive and workaholic and I really put a lot of effort into maintaining a balance between my devotion to my work and all of my passions. It can be exhausting, but the satisfaction I get from even a single instance of positive feedback is too much for me to stop. So I keep on trying.
3. Could you tell us a little bit about WeVux?
WeVux was born as a project at the Politecnico di Milano. The team who started it decided to keep working on it even after the project was over. I first joined as an author and it wasn’t until the beginning of 2016 that I became the creative director.
WeVux is a design blog with a strong focus on young designers and students. The main idea is to discover and promote new talents and fresh ideas by giving the designers a voice and the opportunity to present their projects. The staff works hard to contact designers, photographers and artists from all around the world. We try to meet them in person, when possible, or otherwise, make contact digitally. We are not only focused on students but generally try to find new project and voices that have a touch of uniqueness and peculiarity.
4. Could you share with us the inspiration behind WeVux?
As Giuseppe, one of the original founders of WeVux who is working as Technical Leader, tells me, WeVux was born after an invigorating conversation between the three founders. The three of them were concerned about the missing link between students and the professional world. Starting out fresh from college, students often have great ideas and concepts that are sometimes too raw to be turned into effective projects. There is still the need to collect feedback and gather more ideas and inspiration. What if there was a place to find such things? After conducting over 100 interviews in the major design schools of Milan, it turned out that this issue was more common that expected.
Within the first six months, WeVUX published over fifty articles on the works of Italian students, and by doing so defined itself as a space where young designers are given room to grow. In the following years, WeVux continued to pursue its mission of discovering and promoting new designers. It also began shaping its distinct identity. We are always trying to customise our voice and differentiate ourselves in the world of design blogs. We seek out particular aesthetics and concepts that are uniquely distinctive.
5. How do you define success and how do you measure up to your own definition of it?
That’s a tricky question. I don’t believe in the concept of ultimate success because success always involves failures. In my opinion, success is a misleading term that involves a dangerous way of thinking. What I do believe in is hard work. I think that if you want something you have to work for it and never cheat because cheating always has a negative outcome. If you work hard, honestly and sincerely, doing something for yourself and not for the money or the prestige it will bring you, then you can be successful.
6. Does your activity involve travelling or meeting people from around the world?
While I don’t do a lot of travelling specifically for the blog, I do travel a lot personally and often take advantage of the opportunity to discover new designers when abroad. However, thanks to the digital era and the means available nowadays, we can simply search on the internet for artists and designers from all around the world and contact them. This is also one of my favourite things about WeVux: it brings people together. People who have never met and are thousands of kilometres apart come together and start a conversation about their common passion. I find that amazing.
7. How much do you value travelling? What does it mean to you?
I think that life itself is one big journey, which makes travelling a fundamental aspect of our lives. I travel whenever I get the opportunity to. Travelling truly is the only activity where you spend money and receive something priceless in return: travel experiences that open your mind and help you understand the bigger picture. It brings you in touch with the reality of the world. Sometimes travelling can be stressful, sometimes relaxing and sometimes emotional. But regardless of what emotions it brings, it never fails to enrich my life spiritually, mentally and emotionally.
8. At LocalBini, we believe that shared passion is what brings people together. Does that resonate with WeVux’s values?
Indeed it does. WeVux was born with the purpose of sharing and promoting a particular passion. Through WeVux I got to meet a lot of interesting and inspiring people because of the passion we shared. A simple example is the WeVux team itself, which currently is made up of people living in San Francisco, Milan, Frankfurt, Rotterdam… It’s wonderful to see how a single passion can bring together a team like this. If, as a society, we focused more on our shared passions rather than our differences, then we’d have ourselves a beautiful melting pot.
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