Out of Print
How the Community Karl Aguro Helped Build Saved Him When He Needed Them Most
by Marla Darwin
Photos courtesy of Karl Aguro
The founder of Uncurated Studio talks about growing the design scene in Cagayan de Oro, the personal challenges of the pandemic, and minding his own pace.
2018 would fall in a time period I would call the peak Instagram years and it was thrilling to see a design studio like his introduce itself through social media.
Uncurated Studio is a one-man independent graphic design studio operating out of Cagayan de Oro City in Mindanao, Philippines. The man behind the studio is 29-year-old Karl Adrian Aguro, who has a penchant for brutalist design and doesn’t shy away from explosive color palettes and far-out typography.
When Karl first appears on my screen during our Zoom call, his energy was palpable and in what can only be described as kilig, was in the air as we said hi to each other.
“Finally!” is what I say.
It was our first time to speak outside of social media. While the Uncurated Studio persona online is a loud and confident one, the person behind it was always polite and forthcoming in private chats. The Karl I saw on the screen reflected the latter, but his effervescence quickly took over, infusing his words with laughs and hand gestures. “Hello, Miss Marla!” he waves.
Uncurated Studio started out as a creative outlet while Karl was still holding a day job. Karl says he was longing for a space to practice and figure out his style and point-of-view and what I saw in those early days of the Uncurated Studio feed was a designer yearning to play.
It wasn’t just the growth of a studio I was witnessing on Instagram. Uncurated Studio also gave its followers a chance to see the burgeoning design community in Cagayan de Oro and its relationship to the new businesses in the area. Uncurated Studio became my ambassador to the city. Through its clients, I learned of establishments like Chingkeetea, a Taiwanese milk tea cafe and H Coffee Proper Roasters, a specialty coffee hub. I make mental notes of them and plot them in the makings of an itinerary for a possible trip in the future.
“I guess it’s ironic nga e, during the start, when I started Instagram [as myself], parang hindi siya serious na project. I was just starting out something in the bedroom and created an Instagram account. When I started picking up on people I like following me, from there I started Uncurated, then I started curating my content!” [Laughs.]
Merch Design by Uncurated studio.
Karl Aguro started out as a Chemical Engineering major in Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro. He tells me that he was coasting through his degree, neither failing nor excelling. By the time his thesis came around, it became clear that his semesters of coasting didn’t provide enough momentum to see it through. He tells me that he simply lost interest.
To be fair to Karl, he kept busy in other ways in college. On a whim, he joined the school publication as a layout artist and discovered he had a knack for it. Through the friendships made in the school paper, he joined another friend’s org and honed his skills as a graphic designer through making leaflets and booklets. A path started to emerge.
With no design courses where he was, Karl packed his bags and transferred to the University of San Carlos in Cebu. Friends told him about the school’s esteemed Advertising Arts program and assured him it was the place to be. From there, a whole new world opened up.
“In Cebu I met a lot of designers and I also met a lot of musicians kasi mahilig din ako pumunta sa mga gig after school. I met Karlo (of the band Mandaue Nights) and we became good friends. During that time, I met a lot of bands din… parang nagko-coexist ang mga musicians at designers sa Cebu. They tend to collaborate with each other and help with the album art. I also picked up a lot from their street scene. It’s huge in Cebu.” By “street scene,” he refers to graffiti art, sneakerheads, and indie t-shirts––a subculture that loves its graphic designers.
To be fair to Karl, he kept busy in other ways in college. On a whim, he joined the school publication as a layout artist and discovered he had a knack for it. Through the friendships made in the school paper, he joined another friend’s org and honed his skills as a graphic designer through making leaflets and booklets. A path started to emerge.
With no design courses where he was, Karl packed his bags and transferred to the University of San Carlos in Cebu. Friends told him about the school’s esteemed Advertising Arts program and assured him it was the place to be. From there, a whole new world opened up.
“In Cebu I met a lot of designers and I also met a lot of musicians kasi mahilig din ako pumunta sa mga gig after school. I met Karlo (of the band Mandaue Nights) and we became good friends. During that time, I met a lot of bands din… parang nagko-coexist ang mga musicians at designers sa Cebu. They tend to collaborate with each other and help with the album art. I also picked up a lot from their street scene. It’s huge in Cebu.” By “street scene,” he refers to graffiti art, sneakerheads, and indie t-shirts––a subculture that loves its graphic designers.
Karl chuckles and says that a lot of people mistake him as from Cebu sometimes. I check the Mandaue Nights Instagram feed and I see clear Uncurated Studio imprints on it. I spot a single they dropped earlier in 2021 called “Forgotten ones.” The band announced it with a graphic that harked back to an old school ‘90s sensibility—with cartoony fonts, web 1.0 shapes, and stylized doodles.
When Karl graduated and went back to Cagayan de Oro, he went home to a graphic design industry that was still trying to find its footing. The way he describes it to me is that CDO has a thriving arts and product design scene, but there wasn’t really one for graphic design. “I’d see mga designers but they are the traditional kind... they consider themselves a design studio but in reality they’re more like a printing press that also does tarpaulin and flyer designs.”
He was hoping to find a similar design environment like the one he experienced in Cebu. Because what he envisioned didn’t exist yet, Karl realized he had to begin the work to build community.
His first attempt was Cagayan de Oro’s first Behance Portfolio Review in 2017, a way to bring the online portfolio platform’s users to the offline world.
“Nag-announce kami ng early submissions tapos lima lang yung nag-submit sa graphic design and illustration. But nung event day, ang daming tao! Yung insight namin, parang madaming designers sa CDO pero ‘di sila as confident, or parang shy type sila. After that event, nagkainuman kami ng organizers and people were trying to tell me na, ‘What if we try a conference? Para ma-solve natin ‘yan. Para they go out.’ [The attendees] get to talk about design among themselves.”
He was hoping to find a similar design environment like the one he experienced in Cebu. Because what he envisioned didn’t exist yet, Karl realized he had to begin the work to build community.
His first attempt was Cagayan de Oro’s first Behance Portfolio Review in 2017, a way to bring the online portfolio platform’s users to the offline world.
“Nag-announce kami ng early submissions tapos lima lang yung nag-submit sa graphic design and illustration. But nung event day, ang daming tao! Yung insight namin, parang madaming designers sa CDO pero ‘di sila as confident, or parang shy type sila. After that event, nagkainuman kami ng organizers and people were trying to tell me na, ‘What if we try a conference? Para ma-solve natin ‘yan. Para they go out.’ [The attendees] get to talk about design among themselves.”
In 2019, the first edition of the Oro Design Conference was born. It brought together speakers from Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Davao, Bukidnon, and Manila. Karl, through Uncurated Studio, put together a multi-disciplinary team to produce and run the whole event.
Uncurated Studio has the design materials from the first conference featured on its website. The first thing you notice is the great care the studio to build a brand identity that is grounded in where it’s from with everything in foil-stamped gold. The next thing is the thought that the team placed in making sure the conference goers are able to get as much as they can out of the experience. The whole conference is also a masterclass in executing and cascading a brand identity system. The team didn’t hold back––it was in the videos, lanyards, souvenir totes, posters, and environmental graphics. The Oro Design Conference introduced itself in grand style and I thought of all the young designers who got to experience something like it for the first time.
When I press Karl for more details, especially what it was like to hang out with people he admires, I get the sense that he was just so happy to be able to do it. The adage of “don’t ever meet your heroes” didn’t apply to him.
“When I met Sir Dan [Matutina], thank God, he was so kind, so mabait. Sobrang chika! Sina Raxenne [Maniquiz], Sir Russ [Vergara], super kind people. They’re experiencing the same thing, when you meet then din, they’re also shy, not so talkative, but when you get to know them, they’re just normal people!”
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God… you’re a real person,’” he jokes. “I usually just see them online!”
Uncurated Studio has the design materials from the first conference featured on its website. The first thing you notice is the great care the studio to build a brand identity that is grounded in where it’s from with everything in foil-stamped gold. The next thing is the thought that the team placed in making sure the conference goers are able to get as much as they can out of the experience. The whole conference is also a masterclass in executing and cascading a brand identity system. The team didn’t hold back––it was in the videos, lanyards, souvenir totes, posters, and environmental graphics. The Oro Design Conference introduced itself in grand style and I thought of all the young designers who got to experience something like it for the first time.
When I press Karl for more details, especially what it was like to hang out with people he admires, I get the sense that he was just so happy to be able to do it. The adage of “don’t ever meet your heroes” didn’t apply to him.
“When I met Sir Dan [Matutina], thank God, he was so kind, so mabait. Sobrang chika! Sina Raxenne [Maniquiz], Sir Russ [Vergara], super kind people. They’re experiencing the same thing, when you meet then din, they’re also shy, not so talkative, but when you get to know them, they’re just normal people!”
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God… you’re a real person,’” he jokes. “I usually just see them online!”
“I really spiraled down, I began questioning the work, the content, the community I’m part of. It’s so hard to think about it because you can’t go out to see your friends.”
I had an inkling that Karl was going through something when the Uncurated Studio Instagram went silent for most of 2020. I got used to his many posts that it was noticeable when they weren’t there. For Karl, who like many other extroverts, found the lockdowns an especially hard situation to wade through. The real world was taking a toll on his online one.
I ask him how he’s been doing in the pandemic.
Karl shares with me that he had a Zoom call with another designer friend of ours and both of them were experiencing similar upheavals. It was a call that allowed him to get vulnerable.
“I remember telling her na it’s so sad that I can see Uncurated Studio closing. I told her that. Because we were already talking about the future… it was a big heart-to-heart talk. I was able to tell her that because of the pandemic. I really spiraled down, I began questioning the work, the content, the community I’m part of. It’s so hard to think about it because you can’t go out to see your friends.”
“Then what happened?” I ask.
Karl discloses that he had no intention of mounting the third edition of the Oro Design Conference in 2021. But his friends would not have any of it.
“They were pushing for the third edition of the Oro Design Conference. ‘Karl, please do the Oro Design Conference!’ I was so shocked and I was so touched. Usually I’m the person who’d go, ‘O, let’s do ODC!’ Pero nag-shift. They were still so game to have the conference online. It was very apparent… I just did the art direction for the branding, but everything else was done by them. Even the copywriting and entire staging, figuring out Zoom and the other technicalities. It was all them! I just did very minimal things.
Hindi mawawala yung mga speakers, but all the groundwork was done by my friends. Even the illustrations! I was so touched by that. I was so inspired. At that time, you know it’s something… it was a validation that there was a community. My community. People are into it. People are helping each other. They were all about ‘let’s continue the dialogue.’
They realized it’s also a good representation of Mindanao, our part here, to still do the design thing. After that I felt refueled. I started reflecting on myself, examining the reasons why I spiraled down. Was it because I was putting so much pressure on being a one-man design studio? And that I built a presence online? Eventually I realized it wasn’t the point of everything—online lang, getting attached to the idea of constantly churning out work to be a good studio. It’s not really about that. I thought to myself that the purpose is to do good work and make your clients happy. I realized I was super burned out and I needed to refuel myself, figure out how to take care of myself.”
I’m a graphic designer myself and everything Karl just shared about his burning out hit close to home. I often feel like I’m living two lives, where each one has to act like the other doesn’t exist. In designing for an audience, I feel like I'm living a life where there’s no pandemic. No one here gets sick or dies, the tone here is always optimistic. I still need to be able to convince you to buy or believe in something.
Then we have my actual life, the one away from screens, the one where I’m in a state of nearly perpetual dread. Where I need to take more naps and figure out what show to watch next because I still can’t go out. Where I’m a mom and wife and all I want to do is hold my family close.
There is a transcendence to all of it though. When we’re able to see both lives all at once, we see how each one gives the other meaning. And community is what helps us see.
I ask him how he’s been doing in the pandemic.
Karl shares with me that he had a Zoom call with another designer friend of ours and both of them were experiencing similar upheavals. It was a call that allowed him to get vulnerable.
“I remember telling her na it’s so sad that I can see Uncurated Studio closing. I told her that. Because we were already talking about the future… it was a big heart-to-heart talk. I was able to tell her that because of the pandemic. I really spiraled down, I began questioning the work, the content, the community I’m part of. It’s so hard to think about it because you can’t go out to see your friends.”
“Then what happened?” I ask.
Karl discloses that he had no intention of mounting the third edition of the Oro Design Conference in 2021. But his friends would not have any of it.
“They were pushing for the third edition of the Oro Design Conference. ‘Karl, please do the Oro Design Conference!’ I was so shocked and I was so touched. Usually I’m the person who’d go, ‘O, let’s do ODC!’ Pero nag-shift. They were still so game to have the conference online. It was very apparent… I just did the art direction for the branding, but everything else was done by them. Even the copywriting and entire staging, figuring out Zoom and the other technicalities. It was all them! I just did very minimal things.
Hindi mawawala yung mga speakers, but all the groundwork was done by my friends. Even the illustrations! I was so touched by that. I was so inspired. At that time, you know it’s something… it was a validation that there was a community. My community. People are into it. People are helping each other. They were all about ‘let’s continue the dialogue.’
They realized it’s also a good representation of Mindanao, our part here, to still do the design thing. After that I felt refueled. I started reflecting on myself, examining the reasons why I spiraled down. Was it because I was putting so much pressure on being a one-man design studio? And that I built a presence online? Eventually I realized it wasn’t the point of everything—online lang, getting attached to the idea of constantly churning out work to be a good studio. It’s not really about that. I thought to myself that the purpose is to do good work and make your clients happy. I realized I was super burned out and I needed to refuel myself, figure out how to take care of myself.”
I’m a graphic designer myself and everything Karl just shared about his burning out hit close to home. I often feel like I’m living two lives, where each one has to act like the other doesn’t exist. In designing for an audience, I feel like I'm living a life where there’s no pandemic. No one here gets sick or dies, the tone here is always optimistic. I still need to be able to convince you to buy or believe in something.
Then we have my actual life, the one away from screens, the one where I’m in a state of nearly perpetual dread. Where I need to take more naps and figure out what show to watch next because I still can’t go out. Where I’m a mom and wife and all I want to do is hold my family close.
There is a transcendence to all of it though. When we’re able to see both lives all at once, we see how each one gives the other meaning. And community is what helps us see.
From Oro Design Conference 2020. Photo courtesy of And a Half.All throughout our call, I notice two bicycle helmets resting on a wall rack behind Karl.
“I actually starting cycling last September-November last year, as a form of [exercise]… because I’m getting big during the pandemic and I used to go to the gym. I was very physically stagnant here in my room lang. So I was looking for something that I would enjoy doing. I gave cycling a try and eventually I got into it. And every weekend since January, I’d go out for a ride. Like on Saturdays or Sundays, I’d go out for a 100km ride….” [Laughs.]
We both shriek when I tell him that I also took up cycling in the pandemic. We start talking about doing bike tours with other designers. Our lives start opening up again when we start listing all the creatives we know who took up the hobby. “There are so many of us,” I tell him. We make plans to meet in Manila, Cebu, and Cagayan de Oro.
“I realized that the kind of industry we are in, it’s really prone to burning out and stress, and to too much noise sometimes. [The thing] with cycling is that, it’s just you and the road, it’s like an escape for me. It’s just me and the road. I just focus on the road. No other thing. I also thought about the idea of ‘mind your own pace.’ I met a lot of cyclists on the road and some of them, I’m not so sure if it happens quite a lot, but people tend to race on the road. They want to race and go and scoot over you, and when you overtake them they get mad. You can hear their pedaling approaching you…” He groans in frustration and throws his hands up.
“And I heard one cyclist say, ‘mind your own pace’ and I think it applies to us as a designer, with our careers… or as a person! You’ll have your moment soon. Life is not a race.” ︎
“I actually starting cycling last September-November last year, as a form of [exercise]… because I’m getting big during the pandemic and I used to go to the gym. I was very physically stagnant here in my room lang. So I was looking for something that I would enjoy doing. I gave cycling a try and eventually I got into it. And every weekend since January, I’d go out for a ride. Like on Saturdays or Sundays, I’d go out for a 100km ride….” [Laughs.]
We both shriek when I tell him that I also took up cycling in the pandemic. We start talking about doing bike tours with other designers. Our lives start opening up again when we start listing all the creatives we know who took up the hobby. “There are so many of us,” I tell him. We make plans to meet in Manila, Cebu, and Cagayan de Oro.
“I realized that the kind of industry we are in, it’s really prone to burning out and stress, and to too much noise sometimes. [The thing] with cycling is that, it’s just you and the road, it’s like an escape for me. It’s just me and the road. I just focus on the road. No other thing. I also thought about the idea of ‘mind your own pace.’ I met a lot of cyclists on the road and some of them, I’m not so sure if it happens quite a lot, but people tend to race on the road. They want to race and go and scoot over you, and when you overtake them they get mad. You can hear their pedaling approaching you…” He groans in frustration and throws his hands up.
“And I heard one cyclist say, ‘mind your own pace’ and I think it applies to us as a designer, with our careers… or as a person! You’ll have your moment soon. Life is not a race.” ︎
Marla Darwin is a writer and founder and creative director of Natural Selection Design.