Design Has No Mother Tongue.

I've designed in multiple languages.

English and Danish are my daily reality now, but over the years there's been Spanish for hotels and restaurants in Spain and later for a lifestyle brand in Mexico, Portuguese for a client in Brazil, and Chinese for a Portuguese company selling villas to a Chinese audience, three cultures folded into a single brief. Each one taught me the same lesson in a different way. You cannot simply swap the words and expect the design to hold.

Danish builds composite words, long constructions that often need to be hyphenated to fit a layout. Sometimes that hyphen becomes a design element in itself, a rhythm on the page. Sometimes it just feels clunky and you have to find another way. Portuguese has warmth in its rhythm that changes how formal a piece of communication feels. Spanish wants to expand, and it expands differently in Madrid than it does in Mexico City. Chinese is in a category of its own, working in characters rather than a familiar alphabet was one of the most exciting and at times stressful challenges I've taken on. The back and forth with the translator was careful and slow, checking and rechecking, because a mistranslation in Chinese doesn't just change the meaning. It can insult the reader entirely. At times I've had to produce print documents with two languages sitting side by side, and that changes everything. The length, the structure, the wordiness of one language pulls at the other. The whole design has to flex around both.

What multilingual design has taught me above everything else is that the translator is not a service, they're a collaborator. The best work comes from that back and forth, from understanding not just what the words mean but how they want to land, what they feel like in the mouth of someone who grew up with them. Slowly, carefully, and with a lot of honest conversation about what's working and what isn't. The brief is always the same. What changes is everything else.