Gaia Manai

I've been freelancing since 2023 across brand identity, visual design and UI/UX. In practice they rarely stay separate: an identity that works has to survive inside an interface, and an interface with no identity behind it is obvious at a glance. I use 3D as a way of telling something: I start from what the scene has to say and build from there, not the other way round.

Since the start of 2026 I've also been running an educational project around Blender, for people teaching it to themselves the way I had to. Between Instagram and TikTok it's grown into a community of a few thousand people, and it taught me something I use with clients too: if you can't explain a process clearly, you probably haven't understood it well enough.

Curiosity has always been the engine: try a new technique, learn it, keep it. Before design I spent years building things by hand, between sewing, miniatures, jewellery and cosplay props, and I designed my first logo at sixteen for my uncle. It has all the flaws you'd expect, and it's still in use. Then I found the Media Design course at IED on my own and chose it precisely because it didn't ask me to commit to one thing straight away: editorial and digital graphics, identity, motion, 3D, front end, video mapping. That's where the tools I still work with came from, Blender and Figma above all.

I graduated in 2025 with Riflessi, an immersive interactive installation built by a team of four. Creative direction was my role, but I also handled the site, the 3D visualisation of the environments in Unreal Engine and the hardware integration with Arduino. It's the project where I understood what I'm best at: holding the pieces together, and getting concept, visuals, technology and the people involved to talk to each other.

From October 2025 to April 2026 I worked as a UI/UX designer at Thales Alenia Space. I took it knowing it would strip away almost everything I usually work with: colour, room to experiment, space to break a pattern. Aerospace, constraints everywhere, and the need to carve out space in a context where design wasn't the main language.

I ran research and usability testing, built user flows and high fidelity prototypes, and by the end I had the answer I was after. UX stays with me as a method, but what I want to do is hands on design, where the visual carries weight and some rules are worth pushing against.

I've never believed that boxing yourself into one thing is the only way to be professional. I learn fast, and that's what lets me move from a luxury brand to local tourism to food and beverage without starting from zero each time. I bring something of my own into every project rather than just adapting to what's already there.

Before deciding what something should look like I want to understand what it has to do, and I want what I deliver to hold up outside the presentation: on a small screen, in black and white, in someone else's hands.

Outside work I'm a pop culture person: video games, films, series, comics. That's where a lot of the imagery in my personal work comes from.