Colour, Skulls and Handcraft: How Mexican Design Works

Behind the brightness, the recurring strange imagery and the sometimes rough textures lies a coherent system, shaped by tradition, culture and environment. To read this design, we need to look at its sources — there are just three of them.

1. Colour as a structural element

The vivid colours of Mexican design didn't appear from nowhere. They are the continuation of an ancient tradition in which colour plays a formative role.
Pre-Hispanic cultures used natural dyes that produced saturated hues. Cochineal — an insect living on nopal cacti — yielded a dense red dye that held well on fabric and other surfaces. And that deep red brought with it a habit of bold colour combinations.

Photo: tzompantli — a wall of skulls — art object by  Omar Hernandez

Alongside cochineal came plant and mineral pigments: indigo for blues, earth and stone pigments for ochres, yellows and browns. These colours sat well on traditional materials — clay, lime plaster, textiles. They didn't fade in bright sunlight and held their intensity for a long time.

Climate played an equally important role. In strong sunlight, a saturated colour holds its ground: it doesn't get lost in space or blur into the background. Brightly painted walls, tiles, textiles and everyday objects have clear contour and visual weight, and their colour reads as part of the structure itself.

Architecture reinforced this. Vivid colours on façades, inner courtyards, staircases and doorways organise space: they help you find your bearings, separate planes, set the rhythm of movement.

The same approach carries through to product design: in ceramics, colour emphasises form and relief; in textiles, it highlights the fabric's texture and sets the rhythm of the pattern; in jewellery, it places accents and establishes hierarchy among the elements.

Photo: Sindashi 

2. Symbols and imagery: why they keep recurring

The recurring images in Mexican design grew from several cultural layers that over time merged into a single visual language.

The skull is one of the most recognisable. Its persistence is rooted in the tradition of Día de Muertos — the Day of the Dead. The skull represents memory, the continuity of generations, an acceptance of mortality. Take this mezcal set by Omar Hernandez — with it, having a drink becomes something of a philosophical ritual.

Photo: ceramic mezcal set by  Omar Hernandez

In the early twentieth century, the artist José Guadalupe Posada invented the calavera — a grinning skeleton lady in a wide-brimmed hat. His caricatures mocked social vanity and reminded people that death makes equals of us all. The image was taken up by artists and designers, and Diego Rivera developed it into the catrina — a death allegory dressed in conspicuous finery. This cemented a habit of addressing serious things with dark irony.

Pre-Hispanic animal and mythological imagery has different origins. The jaguar, serpent, eagle and deer appeared in architecture, reliefs, ceramics and ritual objects long before the colonial period. These images were originally markers of status, power and group identity.

Photo:  Etnea

Over time they didn't disappear — they migrated into decorative and applied forms. You'll find them in ornaments, jewellery, textiles and interior objects. The jaguar, for instance, is far more than an animal: it's an ancient symbol of strength, confidence, insight and the crossing between worlds. Which is why a handbag in the shape of a jaguar's head from Carla Fernández is no joke.

Photo: bag by Carla Fernandez

3. Handcraft as part of the design

Craft in Mexico is a continuous production system that never broke down. In many parts of the country, handmade work remained the primary means of producing everyday objects, clothing and utensils for centuries. This formed not only a set of refined techniques but a particular way of thinking about objects.

Mexican craftspeople never aimed for a "perfect" result. Variation in form and texture, a slightly uneven stitch, a mildly asymmetric pattern — these arise naturally, as a consequence of working by hand with a living material. Things made here have no ambition to be fast or identical.

Contemporary Mexican designers have stepped into this system on its own terms. They don't replace craft with a brief and hard deadlines — they enter into dialogue with the makers. The designer sets a direction, a scale, a functional brief; the maker's small variations in size, relief and tone are what make the finished object feel alive. Handcraft becomes part of the design itself, shaping both the appearance of the object and its quality in the hand.

Colour, symbol and handcraft, then, form a connected system in which beauty is inseparable from meaning, and every object serves as a bridge between past and present, between the maker and whoever next touches their work.