From Venezuela to a studio of her own
Vicky Rojas-Smith is Venezuelan and emigrated to the United States. She holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Animation and a master's in Entertainment Business, and had more than ten years of work with agencies, retail businesses and creative studios behind her before founding her own.
That double training —moving image on one side, the entertainment business on the other— explains a good deal about how this site is built: a house that is at once a documentary library and a radio station, and that has to work as both at the same time.
The CORE Method
The studio works with a method of its own that it calls CORE, in four phases: Core Truth, finding the purpose, the values and the story; One Edge, defining what makes that project different from any other; Raw Identity, turning that strategy into visual and verbal language; and Elevated Presence, building the system so the brand says the same thing everywhere.
The studio's premise is that an identity is not decorated, it is translated:
«Branding is not decoration. It's translation.»
Cultural brands, artists and designers
Alma Co. works with cultural brands, artists and designers: projects where identity is not commercial ornament but the way a body of work becomes recognisable. Among the pieces published in its portfolio:
- · D. Geller & Son (2024) — a heritage jewellery house, repositioned as a contemporary luxury brand with its roots in Atlanta.
- · CEASE Collectibles (2024) — a philanthropic trading-card brand, between sport, gaming and the cultural market.
- · HeadsUp (2024) — a consultancy for dental practices, with an identity built on clarity and calm.
- · VASE Concept (2025) — a minimalist fashion and lifestyle brand, with an accent on sustainability.
Commissions with nothing in common
A studio is better portrayed by what it is asked to do than by what it says about itself. And here the commissions have nothing in common: as fine as a jewellery house, as sound as a real-estate advisory, as exact as an industrial portal with a technical library and an online store, and devoted enough to raise the largest digital album there is on an entire culture.
- · rosamariabello.com — the personal brand of a Central Florida realtor and author, bilingual, built on an idea that is almost a motto: “I don't sell houses. I accompany decisions.”
- · tuhogar.inversionconproposito.com — “Inversión con Propósito”, the same practice's advisory arm, built as a path to enquiry rather than a shop window of listings.
- · acdamerica.net — industrial distributor of Fisher valves and spare parts: catalogue, customer portal, technical library and engineering calculators, in English and Spanish.
- · fisheroemparts.acdamerica.net — the online store of that same house: genuine Fisher spare parts with part-number search, live stock, cart, customer account and quote requests, in four languages.
- · culturaminiteka.com — this archive: more than four hundred documented records, every one of them in Spanish and in English, on a movement running from the seventies to the nineties that is still alive in the people who made it. There is no other of this size devoted to this culture.
Why the music was not a leap
From a jewellery house to a miniteca is quite a distance, and yet coming into this project cost nothing: music —whatever the genre— is a standing passion here. And seen up close, the commission was the usual one: find what a thing is made of and put it where it can be seen.
Where it works
The studio works worldwide, in Spanish and in English. On a project like this one that is not an administrative detail: CulturaMiniteka is published in both, and an archive documenting Caracas, Puerto La Cruz and Ciudad Guayana has to read just as well from Miami, from Madrid or from Bogotá.
Why this archive looks the way it does
There is a circle this site closes without saying so out loud. The signal goes out from Orlando for the diaspora and the world; the archive keeps what happened in Caracas, in Puerto La Cruz, in Ciudad Guayana, between 1967 and 1999. And the studio that gives it its shape is led by someone who also left.
From that comes a decision that runs through the whole site: what is designed here is not nostalgia, it is the document. The red that leads, the grid that does not shift from page to page, the size of a headline, the fact that a guerra de minitecas tells you in ten seconds who won and in what year — all of it is studio decisions in the service of one thing, which is that the history should be understood and should be citable.
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