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This 3D brand will be one of the most visible tokens worldwide over the next six years. It’s signed by Tatil, a Brazilian brand strategic consulting and management company that relies on branding and design to come up with sustainable connections between people and brands. The fruit of a two-month creative and collaboration effort that gathered a huge multidisciplinary team from Rio and Sao Paolo studios, the Rio 2016 brand conveys the spirit of the Olympics and its athletes, the city of Rio and Brazil, its
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The posters for the jazz concert by the symphonic orchestra and its pop music performing guests feature the show’s program on the reverse. The Jazz + 2006 poster series came to a close with exhibits that, at the end of the season, extolled the orchestra’s work. It kicked off at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paolo, then traveled all across Brazil and ended up in Havana with a grand total of 27 posters.
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The project was based on the action of looking, banking on a series of instruments that are used in this sense, as the basic element of the exploratory discovery proposed by this museum.
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The main focus of visual interest in any gallery lies in the artists’ works, though they can’t generate a visual identity all by themselves. It’s always important to analyze the relationships between artistic heritage and identity. In the case of this gallery, the notion of the visual system was taken to the limit. By using geometric fonts and square modules, monograms, moulds and diagrams for all the applications were generated, ranging from websites to collectable postcards.

The objective was a characterization of the dance movement. The intention of preventing the project from falling into humdrum led to the use of countless variations, in a way that the manipulation of the brand’s components would render in an assortment of possibilities. In a bid to ease the use by customers, a vast handbook of identity, with nearly a hundred versions, was made.

A few years ago while I was reading one of the main Brazilian newspapers with a morning cup of coffee, a piece of news in the sports section struck my attention: “Metropolis Spooks Jacare Hunter.”* It was all about Edielson’s trip –a Karinu aboriginal born on the border between Brazil and French Guyana– who’d never flown on a plane nor walked on the big city before. He’d gone there to visit Latin America’s most populated city to play a soccer game pitting his team against a local squad.

And, what does design have to do with this? That design lays bare our identity, our history; and this particular event illustrates quite well how diverse and many-sided in terms of culture Brazilian society really is.

We are Latin America’s largest economy; we boast a total surface of over 8.5 million square kilometers, approximately 7,000 kilometers of coastlines, a population of nearly 200 million inhabitants and plurality in terms of ethnics and cultures. Unlike some countries where cultural diversity abounds but cultures don’t melt into one another, we do get mixed and the resulting religious eclecticism and hybridism become parts of our daily lives, thus giving way to an interesting and unclassifiable fusion. In my opinion, this blend is the key to success in the contemporary world because it does include culture-crossing.

Design, as a postulate of industrialization and productive rationalization, grew roots in Europe back in the 1930s, specifically in Bauhaus, and later in Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, the place that begot all major designers that eventually brought the teaching of design to South America. Today, scholars argue that the principles of modern design, the discipline construed as a science and all the underlying knowledge related to it –geometry, typography and the like– will get lost in favor of Americanized estheticism (the famous controversy between design and styling).

Back in the 1960s –the time when Brasilia was unveiled and enthusiasm for economic development was in full swing–different groups of artists and designers in search for a Brazilian identity as the main premise in the practice of graphic design popped up. Such boldface names like Aloisio Magalhães, Geraldo de Barros, Rubem Martins, Alexandre Wollner and many others are good cases in point. It was a moment of economic prosperity well reflected in design, architecture and the arts in general.

It was followed, though, by a black period stripped of perspectives in which we were invaded –until not too long ago– by an inferiority complex that made us copycat whatever hailed from the U.S: or Europe. We won our self-esteem back, yet we kept on looking, in this sea of cultural diversity, for possibilities we could call our own, expressions of what is genuinely ours, laying hands on intangible assets to build on our own wealth.

The images in this article are nothing but a sample of visual identity projects over the past four years, examples that illustrate something about the diversity of Brazil’s graphic design that has now embarked on a quest for emancipation and plural expression.