Near where I live, there’s a poster that hasn’t moved in eight years.
It’s in a closed newsstand at the end of San Jacinto Street, sealed behind glass. I guess the stand shut down and the poster just stayed there, forgotten—an accidental time capsule. The poster belongs to the 15th Seville European Film Festival. It shows a young boy with a boxer’s expression, fists up, ready to fight.*

Everything around him has changed, but he’s still there—as if no one told him the fight was over. In an era where things age in weeks, his persistence feels like a technical glitch, a joke time forgot to finish. In a world that measures success through instant visibility, that poster remains: an image surviving without an audience, without updates, without purpose. A kind of analog oversight that refuses to fade.

Design, though it’s always been this way to some extent, lives in a permanent state of combat. It doesn’t fight to win rounds but to find a space where it can fight at all. The rhythm has sped up, and we’ve learned to move in a hurry. Space has shrunk in time, and what used to take twelve or fifteen rounds must now be done in three. Our “fight time” has been reduced to YouTube highlight reels. We’ve been trained to endure rapid scene changes while spending more and more hours staring at the display window.

Contemporary design has fully embraced the logic of content: it exists because it must keep existing. If you don’t post for a day, you disappear. If you don’t produce, you stop counting. Visibility becomes a kind of artificial respiration—stay connected so the referee doesn’t call you out of the match.

Designing with your fists doesn’t mean throwing punches endlessly; it means defending quality as if it were an endangered species. To keep betting on process, on research, on a critical eye. Not because it’s profitable, but because it’s the only way to still feel that what we do makes sense.

I don’t want to be absorbed and used by the machine. AI matters in the process—it helps, just as a paintbrush helps you avoid painting everything by hand—but it should never tell you what to paint. Otherwise, we’re just participating in fixed fights. The street no longer needs posters; it has screens, lightboxes, banners—clean, well-designed spaces made precisely for that. These spaces are like nets, built for smooth circulation.

The city doesn’t need poorly glued posters messing up its walls and shopfronts. The poster can’t compete. Its time is no longer ours. Almost no one makes posters for the street anymore. We keep making them so we don’t have to admit they no longer serve a purpose—like someone who insists on using a typewriter because it “feels more authentic.”

We no longer design for the public; we don’t seek to communicate—we seek to be seen. Sometimes I feel we design out of fear: fear of not appearing, not existing, not updating. The anxiety of presence has become the new aesthetic. Against that fear, the poster represents the opposite of anxiety: accident. It wasn’t meant to last. It doesn’t get likes. It isn’t shared. Yet it keeps its charm precisely because it escapes control. No one can measure its reach. No analytics can tell how many saw it or what it achieved. Its success, if it exists at all, is untraceable—and that makes it a beautiful form of resistance. In an age obsessed with data, the poster is a black hole: it returns no information. It’s just there, still fighting in the street.

Designing with your fists is a way to remember that design isn’t just a technical process—it’s a stance. Raising your fists isn’t really about challenging an enemy; it’s about reminding yourself there’s still a body attached. There are still hands, rhythm, and skin tough enough to take a few hits. From that friction, the quality of good work is born.

The goal is to keep finding spaces to work in. To take design where it isn’t expected—to the body, to sound, to silence, to conversation. If the poster no longer has a wall to be pasted on, it can dedicate itself to something else: simply existing. To being a fragment of an image that doesn’t sell but still looks back. To be, simply, an excuse to remember that design can have presence without having utility.

Defending quality in an age of quantity is almost a provocation. It’s not about making “better design,” but about refusing to let design become noise. Quality isn’t an aesthetic value—it’s a form of resistance. Doing less and doing it better has no glamour, no reward. But it’s a way of not surrendering to the logic of saturation.

The poster of the young boxer didn’t survive because someone took care of it—it survived because no one bothered to take it down. And in that indifference, it found its chance. What was meant to last a few weeks has been standing there for eight years, fists still raised. There’s no strategy for that. Only chance, persistence, and a kind of absurd faith in the stubborn endurance of an image. It communicates nothing useful—and that’s exactly why it says so much.

Maybe designing today means just that: keeping your fists up even when you don’t know who you’re fighting. Fighting without knowing how, but still ready. Because design, in the end, doesn’t disappear—it just transforms into its own fight: resisting whatever comes next.

* Poster for the 15th Seville European Film Festival (2018). The image is a still from Roy Andersson’s A Swedish Love Story.