Creative people are not organised and organised people are not creative.
This heuristic is one your writer has clung to for some time.
But that’s the problem with heuristics. They are, by their nature, oversimplifications.
And to illustrate this, Nuno shows us a spreadsheet.
On it is listed every individual task he’s carried out in the past year and a half he’s been at Cranmore.
It’s adorned with fancy conditional formatting and shaded cells.
“I’m a logic guy. A maths guy,” he says.
Yet Nuno is Cranmore’s UI/UX manager, gilding hard, cold code with colour and spirit and, on occasion, emotion.
We ask whether he was the kid whose schoolbooks were covered in scrawled drawings of ninja turtles. But we’re completely off.
“No, I was more about computers growing up – my mum used to work in IT,” he tells us, speaking of his childhood in Portugal.
“We always had computers at home and I would disassemble them,” he says. “I had uncles and aunts that could help me if I ‘bricked’ it. I was surrounded by computer people.”
Nuno undertook a marketing degree after school but his experience on his placement year would signal a sharp turn in his career.
“They gave me a year to market a new product – an organic jam,” he explains.
“Within two months I was ready. I had a full marketing plan and presented it to the board.
“But they already that. Instead, what that wanted was to design this new product – bring it to life. The problem was, I didn’t know anything about design.”
Over the next 10 months he taught himself, later formalising his learning with a second degree, this time in design.
The perspective of living somewhere like Angola makes you value different things.
Nuno Granada
This new direction would see him return to his mother’s home country of Angola, where he lived and worked for 10 years, becoming a communications director for a university group and building a successful design agency with his then girlfriend, now wife.
“We had a pretty good life there,” he says. “But the perspective of living somewhere like Angola makes you value different things.”
Things like a steady supply of electricity and uninterrupted running water.
Nuno and his wife spent a year scoping out different countries in search of a new home to raise a child, with Northern Ireland just winning out over Luxembourg and Switzerland.
It’s been quite a journey.
Nuno explains his first business was a Kindergarten that he started with his sister at the age of 20. He had stints as a semi-professional handball player, a forklift driver at Moypark. He’s had international medical companies among design clients.
“If it doesn’t make sense to me I just say no,” he says. “Before I start work on anything, I ask who is going to us this? What’s the purpose? I need to fully understand what you do, and why you do it.
“The work we’ve been doing with Microsoft Dynamics recently, I said I need to know how to work with Dynamics myself; I need to experience it to know what to design.”
“For me it’s about creating things that work. That’s the most important thing.”
And it’s upon this systematic approach, this bedrock of organisation, that Nuno’s creativity flourishes.
Well, we learn something new every day.
