I steal boredom. José Rocha — Jopecuro: award-winning creative manager, brand & web designer and educator in Porto, Portugal.
Open for select projects
José Rocha — creative manager, designer & educator.
Jury at Awwwards & Orpetron.
I STEAL
BOREDOM*
*Legally speaking. I wrote a book about it — my record is clean.
I replace monotony with lateral thinking.
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Brand Identity ✺ Web Design ✺ Creative Direction ✺ UX/UI ✺ Marketing Strategy ✺ Creative Education ✺ Brand Identity ✺ Web Design ✺ Creative Direction ✺ UX/UI ✺ Marketing Strategy ✺ Creative Education ✺
01
The Confession
I wrote “O Assalto Criativo” with one intention: to rob the corporate world of its monotony.
Armed with an MBA and a Master in UX/UI, I’m the rare hybrid who loves a perfect colour
palette as much as a solid ROI. I direct brands by day, teach design by profession, and
collect awards as a consequence. If you speak Design or Business — we already share a language.
Boredom, apprehended. Porto, PT.
8+Years of craft
15+International distinctions
03Award juries
01Book on creativity
02
Capabilities
Identities engineered to be remembered — strategy, logo systems, guidelines and packaging that give a brand its voice and keep it consistent everywhere it speaks.
Strategy
Logo systems
Guidelines
Packaging
Award-winning websites and interfaces — design systems, prototypes and motion that turn a first visit into a lasting impression. Recognised by Awwwards, CSSWinner and One Page Love.
UX/UI
Design systems
Motion
Front-end direction
From concept to final crop — campaigns, editorial design and image direction with an obsessive eye for detail and a healthy disrespect for the expected.
Campaigns
Editorial
Illustration
Retouching
MBA-backed thinking: positioning, digital marketing and e-commerce strategy that make the beautiful things measurable — and the measurable things beautiful.
Positioning
Digital marketing
E-commerce
Social media
Tutor at the London School of Design & Marketing and teacher at the Professional School of Gaia — training the next generation of designers to steal boredom too.
IPP Porto Design FactoryAfterworks — Design & Visual Communication2018
06
Selected Works 2019–2024
Hover to peek — clickTap to open the case file.
07
The Manifesto in Print
O Assalto Criativo
O Assalto Criativo — the book by José Rocha
A book written with the sole intention of robbing the corporate world of its monotony.
Lateral thinking, creative confidence — and a perfectly clean criminal record.
A Portuguese wine brand built on a joke the whole country gets and no label would print. The
name is an expletive turned into a compliment — caralhus que vinho — and the
entire design problem was making it hold a bottle you would still put on a good table.
So the brand went the other way from the name: an engraved cellarman leaning on his barrel,
a serif that belongs on an Alentejo estate, and a wax-seal mark reading CRLH Vinhos
Distintos. Everything is played straight. The joke sits in four letters and stays there.
Three wines from the Alentejo, each with its own colourway on the same label architecture:
a white — Antão Vaz, Roupeiro and Arinto — a red built on Alicante Bouschet, Aragonez and
Trincadeira, and a Reserva that pairs Alicante Bouschet with Cabernet Sauvignon.
The tasting notes carry the same double register: the technical sheet is exact about grapes,
fermentation and cellaring, while the social edit talks the way people actually talk about wine
after the second glass.
K8K Travel organises corporate and leisure trips for people who measure a journey by what it
gives back, not by how far it went. The brief was a mark with the authority of aviation and none
of its coldness.
The wings came from a hummingbird — the one bird that can hover, reverse and cross a gulf
without stopping. Traced from the real wingspan, they hold a circular K8K badge, and the
claim finishes the thought: together we go beyond.
Every part is specified: Aquawax Black for the K, Acto Bold for the 8, Lato for the claim, with
clear-space and minimum sizes drawn against the badge itself so the mark survives a boarding pass
and a building façade equally.
Navy carries the brand, copper carries the moments worth paying for, and the photography does
the selling — aerial water, Aegean white, a wing above the clouds.
Case file № 03
MCCM Cosmetics
Role
Marketing & Design Manager
Collaborator
Luísa Costa Gomes
Years
2019–2023
Field
Medical Cosmetics
MCCM is a Spanish medical-cosmetics house selling to two very different audiences at once:
clinicians buying mesotherapy actives, and consumers buying skincare. One identity had to speak
with authority to both — clinical enough to be trusted with a needle, desirable enough to sit on
a bathroom shelf.
The answer was a system rather than a look. Black, white and a single signal red carry the
brand; a secondary palette codes the product families, so a mesotherapy ampoule and a homecare
cream are unmistakably related and never confused. The spirit of beauty holds it together.
Every layout is specified down to the millimetre — grid, margins, type sizes, the height of the
colour bar that names each category. That rigour is what let a small team ship a 200-page catalogue,
a professional range and a homecare range without the brand drifting.
The same system runs the social calendar: education posts, routines, product launches and
seasonal campaigns, all built from the layout rules rather than designed one by one.
The Advent of Beauty calendar started as a 3D model of the box itself, which then produced every
campaign image — no photo shoot, twenty-four doors, three brands in one package.
Mille Voeux makes reed diffusers and home fragrance for people who buy with their eyes before
their nose. Two collections, one bottle: the shape, the glass, the closure, the label and the box
were all drawn for this brand, then split down the middle into two opposite personalities.
The manual holds both together. An MV monogram cut in a high-contrast serif, the 1552
crest, the desire of discovery beneath it — with clear space fixed at two thirds of the
icon and every approved and forbidden ground drawn out, because a label wraps around glass and
forgives nothing.
The black and white collection is the restrained half. Optical-illusion line work ripples
around the label so it reads as movement even standing still; the monochrome keeps the eye on the
drawing and the die-cut silhouette. It scales across three bottle sizes without losing the effect.
The special edition is the loud half. Labels in a dozen saturated colours overlap and overrun
each other around the bottle, so no two units read the same from across a room. Same glass, same
crest, opposite temperament.
Five fragrances — Ozonic Bergamot, Sweet Rose, Spicy Cedarwood, Sensual Patchouli, Imperial
Veviter — each with its own colour, carried onto 200 ml refills so the bottle stays and only
the scent is replaced.
Mesocross sells professional mesotherapy equipment to clinics — the supreme jewel of
youth. The monogram is a knot of interlocking rings, drawn in a dozen variants so the mark can
become a pattern, a watermark or a single stamp without redrawing it each time.
The brand book is not a mood board. It is a set of construction rules: the module X derived from
the logotype, margins expressed as fractions of that module, and the product photograph placed
against it — so an A4 flyer, an A3 poster and a 300×250 banner are the same layout at three scales.
Every format a distributor might ask for is drawn out and dimensioned, down to the Twitter
header, with the typefaces and point sizes named on the page. The point is that someone who has
never met the brand can still lay it out correctly.
The same rules then had to carry a 47-page product catalogue: an index rail running down the
outer edge of every spread, product photography on a graduated ground, and a black cover carrying
nothing but the monogram repeated into a field.
Houndstooth makes sustainable oral-hygiene products. The name is already a joke the audience
gets — so the mark had to be the serious half: a bolt cut from two opposing tooth silhouettes,
reading as energy from one side and as care from the other.
A brand this small does not get a brand manager. It gets a printer, a packaging supplier and a
web developer, each working alone from whatever file they were sent. So the deliverable was not a
logo — it was a 23-page rulebook that answers the questions those three people actually ask.
Horizontal and stacked construction on a shared modular grid, clear space defined as a fraction
of the symbol rather than a fixed measure, and minimum and maximum heights in both pixels and
millimetres — 15 mm before the bolt closes up, 90 mm before it starts to shout.
Eight approved grounds, from white through to photography, each tested at the size the logo
will really be used at. Then the same clear-space rule carried onto merchandise, drawn against
the garment itself so nobody has to guess.
Mesosystem is the house behind the brands — a Portuguese cosmetics manufacturer whose name
reaches partners, distributors and trade fairs rather than the end consumer. It needed an identity
that could stand above MCCM, mesopharma and the rest without competing with any of them.
So the corporate brand went quiet where the product brands are loud: an ms monogram in a
high-contrast serif, a palette of black through to bone with one warm brown, and a single claim —
beauty is a powerful force that moves us.
The layout system is specified the same way the print work is: grid, margins, type sizes and the
exact ratio between headline and body. Product photography was art-directed to match — white on
white for the professional range, warm amber for the ampoules, deep black for the corporate frame.
The system carried the company's own story too: a year-in-review campaign covering investments,
research, the mesopharma launch, five international fairs — Bogotá, São Paulo, Bologna, Monaco,
Singapore — and the year's awards, PME Líder, PME Excelência and Inovadora COTEC 2022.
Jury member — Awwwards (since 2018) & Orpetron (since 2026).
The thief now guards the vault.
