the DESIGNphile ...

... is known offline as Gabriel Fontes de Faria, a Brazilian designer living in Chicago for 11 years and counting.

Gabriel was born in Rio de Janeiro, but didn't live there long enough to learn how to samba. He began a life of moving at a young age, initially because of his father's job, and later because of his own passion for the new and desire for the unknown. After Rio came Porto Alegre (Brazil), Caracas (Venezuela), Miami (USA), and finally Chicago (USA), where he studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the university designed by Mies van der Rohe.

Surrounded by a family that loves everything design related (75% of his family is made up of architects, the other 25% secretly wishes they were), the main lesson he learned while young was actually from his grandfather who told him "we have two eyes and two ears, but only one mouth for a reason". From that moment on Gabriel has quietly observed the world around him, often picking up on things others missed or took for granted. More recently he began amassing a collection of images of design that he found inspiring, not just the man-made kind but also the naturally occurring.

the DESIGNphile is a place where those observations are shared with the world.

Disclaimer: The photos on this site are a collection of things I come across online and offline and that I find interesting and worth sharing. I do not hold the rights to any of these images (unless noted), but I do try my best to give credit to the author of the work as well as the photographer and source where I got the image from. If you own an image you see on this website, and you would like me to either add more information to that image, or to remove it altogether, please feel free to contact me. Thank you!