Presenting Iconódulo-Iconoclasta: TBS first studio project

At The Brand Side, we believe that design isn’t just about building brands — it’s about understanding the cultural forces that make them matter. With that spirit, we launched our first studio drop: ICONODULO–ICONOCLASTA, a poster series created by our founder and design lead, Alex Valcarcel.

This series is a visual essay in twelve parts. Each poster reflects a meditation on how the human experience is shaped by our obsession with figures: the iconic, the fallen, the reimagined. Icons are rarely neutral — they are loaded with desire, projection, conflict, and mythology. We don’t aim to declare what should be revered. Instead, we’re observing how the world elects its saints, martyrs, memes, and messiahs. And how, just as quickly, it burns them down.

The name ICONODULO–ICONOCLASTA holds the tension of this exploration. On one side, the iconodule: the worshipper of images, the one who seeks meaning through symbolic reverence. On the other hand, the iconoclast: the breaker of symbols, the one who confronts and questions what the masses hold sacred. This duality isn’t just historical, but it plays out every day in branding, pop culture, politics, and even personal identity.

This drop also marks a creative manifesto for us. As a design studio, we’re often tasked with turning businesses into brands, creating systems, logos, and stories. But ICONODULO–ICONOCLASTA is a space for us to break our own rules. It’s not commercial, it’s critical. It’s not for clients, it’s for the culture.

We’re interested in the moment where something becomes unforgettable. The gesture, the form, the glitch, the attitude. We believe a brand (just like an image) becomes iconic not when it is perfect, but when it is felt, when it provokes. When it dares.

The icons we chose for this series come from wildly different worlds: pop culture, religion, history, and internet folklore. Some are instantly recognizable, others are obscure by design. A regime rebel, a forgotten demon, a digital glitch, a mural from Osaka, a paint turned meme, to name a few: each one was selected for their symbolic overload.

They are icons that speak of excess, contradiction, and transformation. They remind us that cultural relevance is often accidental, emotional, or unstable. Through these figures, we examine how society assigns meaning and how those projections can be reclaimed, rejected, or reimagined.

Alex Valcarcel is the founder and design lead at The Brand Side. With a strong background in poster design and visual essays, Alex’s work navigates the tension between analogue imperfections and digital precision. His style is unapologetically eclectic: merging found imagery, rough textures, bold typography, and unexpected glitches. For Alex, posters are not just a format but a playground to test ideas, provoke reactions, and question what visual culture can be. ICONODULO–ICONOCLASTA is another chapter in his ongoing exploration of images that both seduce and disrupt.

This series is deeply personal for Alex, reflecting his ongoing fascination with how printed posters can act as social commentary. From his early experiments with photocopies to digital collages, ICONODULO–ICONOCLASTA blends both worlds.  The serie is about preserving the raw edge of the street poster and confronting it with digital manipulations. For Alex, each piece is a question mark thrown at our shared hunger for symbols and the contradictions they hold.