I built Sekondo to get more time to design.

A designer who knows
the work from the inside.

I am Jose Manuel Fernández. I started in 1992, drawing comics and laying out pages in QuarkXPress, PageMaker and FreeHand.

Today I run Colectivo Zulú, a studio for graphic design, 3D architectural visualisation and digital set design, based in Málaga and Córdoba. I still work with clients, handle their changes and get deliveries out every day.

I built it for myself first.

The studio gets jobs that ask for the same operations over and over again. They are necessary, but they eat the hours I would rather spend thinking through an idea. I started developing Sekondo so it could take on part of that work inside my own documents.

It started with a layout artist’s habit: leaving eye-catching notes on the pages to remember what is still pending.

Those notes were already part of the way I work. The first thing I asked Sekondo to do was read them. From there, I kept widening what it could do.

Now I want to put it
in the hands of my peers.

Using it on my own projects, I began to see how far it could go.

The tasks that take my time are part of the daily work of a lot of creative professionals too. That is why I decided to share Sekondo with peers everywhere: so they can use it in their own work and bring needs and ways of working I have not come across yet.

During the launch programme, your messages come straight to me. Every suggestion helps me decide how to improve the tool, and whatever gets better, we both get to use.

After thirty-four years in the trade, I still want to design. And I want to spend more of my time doing it.