Nervous and loquacious, I told him the intentions of our project – at that time still in the ideation phase – which he listened to with kindness and patience, until I finally began to review his biography and his professional career which, although I had found very well told on his own website, required details in relation to Murcia and some updating.

Pepe began by giving me a headline: “I was born Murcian, but they made me La Mancha”. Indeed, born when “Murcia, dos: Murcia y Albacete” was sung at school, when he returned from the USA, where he trained and married the American Pamela Hampton, many things began to change in Spain. One of them, that Murcia had become a uniprovincial autonomy, leaving the people of Hellín “outside the walls”.

Between 1981 and 1986, he and Pamela had a small house in Bolnuevo and a design studio in Murcia. Times of great friendship with Pepe Jiménez, with whose printing house, Jiménez Godoy, they collaborated intensely. Times of also dealing with Teresa Arnal, Antonio Ballester, Vicente Martínez Gadea, Raúl and Jorge, from Compomur…

Pamela, who passed away in 1997, is mentioned several times throughout our conversation. He shared life with her from his time studying graphic design at Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio) and a lot of creative work afterwards. Photographer and writer, I feel that it would have been great to meet her. A quote of his from 1993 in issue 38 of Revista Visual deserves virality: “Design is at the same time and equally an aesthetic activity of doing, and an intellectual activity to solve problems of doing”.

In 2003, while back in the USA, Pepe was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, the first misdiagnosis that he has now adjusted to a retinal dystrophy of genetic origin with a mutation of the PRP H2 gene. He returned to Spain in 2005 to work less and less on professional assignments until he did only “things for friends and non-profit”. At the time of our talk, officially blind, he is in the process of accepting vision loss. Affiliated with ONCE for more than a year, he has volunteers from the organization who help him with computer matters to correct three books that he has just finished: an “Anthology of Flamenco”, another dedicated to the “Self-commissions” that graphic designers often undertake, and a third, didactic, “a kind of travel notebook on visual identity”. he tells me.

In addition, she has been singing flamenco for seventeen years; he rehearses every week with a guitarist of the quality of El Mami, who accompanied, among others, Camarón.

Pepe Giménez del Pueblo has made an important donation from his archive to the National Museum of Decorative Arts and another, small but very beautiful and pertinent, to Edi, the Higher School of Design of the Region of Murcia. With praise and memories for common friends – such as Sofía Rodríguez Bernis, director of the MNAD, and Armando Cano and Carmen Iranzo, from the Edi – the colleagues of DIP are summoned to visit him in Madrid whenever we want.

And so ended my first conversation with this resilient and great designer who was born… Murcia.