Looking back on over three decades of work as a creative professional, I find myself compelled to share the story that brought me here. Each step — from music to multimedia to literary writing — has shaped not only my career but also my understanding of memory, identity, and the power of creative form. I hope these reflections offer insight to anyone who, like me, has followed their passions across disciplines, technologies, and borders in search of something lasting and true.
Roots in Resilience and Art
My story begins as a young boy in Montevideo, Uruguay, during the political unrest of the 1970s. In the wake of Uruguay’s military coup d’état, my family left the country and settled in Canada, carrying with us the traditions of our cultural homeland in northwestern Spain. Although we were welcomed into our new home, the turmoil of that time left a lasting impression on me — instilling a deep scepticism of militaries and authoritarian structures, and a reluctance to return to Uruguay given certain family ties to the regime.
Amidst the urban energy of Toronto and the solitude of Hockley Valley, I found grounding in visual art and music — two passions that would go on to shape the entire course of my life. I received a guitar for Christmas when I was six and soon began formal studies in classical guitar at a respected music conservatory. By my mid-teens, I was an award-winning soloist and a junior music teacher. The guitar became my language, a form of resonance that felt more intimate than speech. Around the same time, I discovered a love for illustration and visual composition. These two threads — sound and image — have remained entangled ever since.
The Glueleg Years and a Thriving Music Scene
Throughout high school, I played in several local rock bands, but in 1990, I co-founded Glueleg, an alternative-rock band that would define much of my creative twenties. As one of its principal songwriters, vocalists, and the band’s driving force, I poured myself into composition and performance, and the Chapman Stick — a unique, contemporary multi-stringed instrument that added a signature texture to our sound.
Glueleg blended rock with avant-garde influences, pushing musical boundaries and resisting categorisation. We signed to a decent publishing deal with a major label, released four albums and two EPs, and toured extensively across Canada and the U.S. Our songs charted, our videos received national airplay, and we carved out a modest but loyal following. While the world has changed, our music still lives on through digital platforms, and every now and then someone reaches out to say a song meant something to them. That connection — ephemeral, emotional, sonic — continues to move me.
Multimedia Innovation and Digital Design Beginnings
In the early 2000s, my creative direction pivoted. With the rise of the World Wide Web and the growing cultural influence of video games and new media, I sought out freelance work as a multimedia producer. I had spent years in recording studios and on video sets, and those experiences translated well to the evolving digital landscape. One book in particular, Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, deeply influenced my thinking at the time — its vision of an information-driven society inspired me to reimagine my role not just as a musician, but as a designer of experiences.
By 2003, I had acquired enough programming skills to develop a multimedia engine for producing interactive music videos — an innovation that allowed audio, animation, and real-time interaction to converge. This technology, hosted on Macromedia Shockwave (before Adobe’s acquisition), foreshadowed the kind of audio-visual interactivity that would later be popularised by franchises like Guitar Hero. It marked my entry into digital experience design — a space where music, code, and motion could speak a new language.
Over this time, I expanded into motion graphics, sound design, scripting, and post-production. I also began building a network of talented creatives — hiring, mentoring, and helping them shape their own paths. This period introduced me to global collaboration and reinforced a belief I still hold: that digital design is not just technical work, but a narrative craft.
ALONSO.studio and the Art of Digital Transformation
In the 2010s, I launched ALONSO.studio, a digital design agency operating out of a converted barn on my farm in Terra Nova, Ontario. It became a creative hub for projects spanning fintech, global logistics, software, education, and the arts. At its heart was a desire to build “transformative experiences” — not just slick interfaces, but immersive, emotionally grounded work that could inspire, inform, and move.
Clients have included SAP, Santander, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Every project has presented a different challenge, but the throughline has always been the same: to bring story to life through design and technology. I believe deeply in the role of aesthetics in experience — not as decoration, but as meaning itself.
During this time, I returned to live music, performing classical guitar in small bistros and venues across the Georgian Triangle. That return to intimacy — to sitting with an audience and simply playing — became essential. Eventually it led me to Bodrum, Turkey, where I lived for two years, performing at boutique hotels and managing digital projects remotely. It was a chapter of cultural richness, solitude, and renewal.
Music That Kept Me True
Moving into the late 2010s, I composed and recorded four solo albums and two more with Glueleg. Each was shaped with deep intention and exacting care. I poured myself into the arrangements, the lyrics, the textures — not as a career strategy, but as a way of staying artistically alive in the world. I didn’t pursue much promotion. I wasn’t trying to keep up. But the work’s authenticity speaks for itself — slowly released, sometimes underheard, but fully realised. These weren’t side projects. They were acts of sincere self-expression.
One of the great joys of that period was spending two months at Real World Studios, near Bath, England — recording my second album of solo music inspired by the landscapes and stories of the Aegean. That record marked a kind of full circle for me: a return to music for its own sake, composed with a sense of place, space, and stillness. I let go of commercial expectations. I followed the sounds that felt honest.
The Digital Designer Designation
As my career continued to evolve, I’d been recognising a recurring theme throughout my professional relationships: clients, collaborators, musicians and designers frequently sought out my insights, asking how they might leverage their own artistic talents and skills across the diverse fields I’ve explored. This demand for comprehensive, industry-relevant learning sparked an idea, and in my 50th year, I felt the timing was right to develop something new and impactful — a programme that would reflect the full spectrum of digital design skills and knowledge I’d cultivated over the years.
That led me to develop the Digital Designer Designation, an eLearning certification programme that redefines digital design as a multidisciplinary creative field. It brings together five domains — Audio Production, Multimedia Design, Artificial Intelligence, Web Development, and Digital Transformation — into a cohesive curriculum. With 26 self-paced courses, the programme doesn’t just teach skills; it builds a mindset of integration, curiosity, and creative leadership.
The idea is to prepare digital creatives not just for the jobs of today, but for the cultural shaping roles of tomorrow. We live in a world shaped by screens and signals — but beneath that, we still crave meaning, beauty, and coherence. That’s what great design can offer.
Memory, Music, and a New Chapter in Spain
In recent years, I’ve begun re-establishing my roots in Spain. I’ve collaborated with institutions in Madrid, and I now divide my time between Toronto and the Cantabrian mountains — where I’m building a remote home studio, composing music and writing, deepening my connection to land, language, and heritage.
These landscapes have become central to my newest creative chapter: literature.
From Essays to Fiction
Throughout my creative journey, I’ve always had an independent fascination with neuroscience and philosophy — drawn to the underlying mysteries of perception, emotion, and memory, not just as academic subjects but as living questions that shape how we make meaning. These are the roots of creative process and identity, after all. Over time, this curiosity evolved into a need to explore how knowledge and feeling intersect, how thought becomes texture, how memory leaves its mark not only on the brain but on culture, language, and land.
This led me to essay writing — at first as a way to clarify ideas, and then as a form of creative synthesis. I began publishing essays on creative identity, cultural memory, and the emotional architecture of design. These pieces appear regularly on the innovative and fledgling INSPO app, alongside reflections on art, sound, and the search for coherence in a hyper-mediated world.
At the same time, I’ve been quietly working on a novel — a deeply emotional, speculative literary work titled That Which Remembers Us. The story traces the transmission of memory across generations, species, and systems, carried through music, resonance, and landscape. In many ways, it weaves together the themes that have shaped my life: exile, ecology, inheritance, and the unfinished work of remembrance. The book will be published in 2026.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
As I reflect on this journey, I’m reminded of how non-linear creative life can be. From the alt-rock stages of the ’90s to the deep code of digital product design, from solo concerts to speculative fiction — my path has been shaped by the belief that creativity itself is borderless.
For me, music and design are two sides of the same impulse: the desire to communicate something true. And now, with writing as a new home, I feel like I might be weaving it all together — string, screen, and story.
Carlos Alberto Alonso | Toronto, 2024
