Visual identity and bumper for the first edition of the film festival Farol, held at CineSesc under the theme of “O cinema entre a memória e agora” (“Cinema between memory and the present”).

The exhibition’s visual identity was inspired by the colors of nautical signaling and developed through a combination of analog and digital techniques, seeking to connect with the exhibition’s subtitle by creating dialogs/articulations with the graphic memory of tickets and admissions from street cinemas. We started from the circle as a point of light, which appears in fragments, sometimes revealing, sometimes concealing, sometimes multiplying itself. The graphic system was composed using the Jean-Luc typeface, developed by Atelier Carvalho-Bernau in 2010, inspired by the opening title sequences of the films Made in U.S.A. and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, by Jean-Luc Godard.

Circus is movement, memory, and, above all, enchantment.

From an invitation by Sesc São Paulo came the challenge of visually translating the 8th edition of Circos, a festival that transforms the city into a contemporary big top. In August 2025, São Paulo became a meeting point for artists from 21 countries, weaving together cultures, languages, and timelines into a single sensory narrative.

Guided by the concept “Enchantment Beyond Time,” the project is built upon three pillars: memory, movement, and enchantment. These elements do not appear as isolated ideas, but as forces that intersect, shaping a living, pulsating identity in constant transformation.
Memory reveals itself through an aesthetic construction that evokes traditional circus imagery, with visual references that echo popular culture and classic spectacle forms. Movement emerges through the repetition and variation of geometric modules, creating patterns that vibrate, almost as if in rotation, mirroring the bodies of performers, their spins, leaps, and fluid gestures. Enchantment manifests in the intense color combinations and dynamic compositions that invite the viewer to wander, discover, and immerse themselves.

Graphic elements take center stage within the visual system. Built from simple shapes such as circles, triangles, and ellipses, they unfold into modular patterns that move between the contemporary and the ethnic. There is a sense of universality rooted in the local, as if each repetition carries a collective memory, reinterpreted through a new lens. These patterns are not static: at times they appear as bold surfaces, at others as fragments that invade compositions, creating rhythm, tension, and surprise.

Black and white photography acts as a counterpoint, grounding the project in the reality of the body and performance. While the graphic elements expand the imaginative realm, the images document the human gesture, establishing a dialogue between the tangible and the symbolic. This relationship reinforces the idea of time, where past and present coexist within the same visual space.

The color palette is bold and carefully orchestrated. Warm tones such as red, orange, and yellow interact with deep greens and purples, creating vibrant contrasts that evoke energy, diversity, and cultural strength. It is a palette that does not whisper, it projects. It occupies space, draws attention, and sustains the festive atmosphere of the circus.

The exhibition Antípodas – Tão Distantes, Tão Próximos (“Antipodes – So Distant, So Close”) celebrates the 130th anniversary of the Friendship Treaty between Brazil and Japan, developed in partnership between Sesc Vila Mariana and the Japan Foundation. The project unfolds as a visual identity and wayfinding system for the largest spatial occupation ever held at the venue. More than placing artworks within the space, the exhibition design and signage needed to structure, orient, and guide visitors across multiple floors and formats of artistic production.

The starting point comes from the title itself: antipodes are opposite points on the planet, connected by an imaginary line – a direct image to speak about distance, relationship, and continuity between the two countries. The solution balances references from Japanese visual culture, such as rounded typefaces and codes embedded in the kawaii universe, with a graphic logic that shifts between restraint and excess. At times, white backgrounds and minimal elements; at others, color, layering, and density. This contrast organizes the journey and creates shifts in rhythm throughout the visit, extending into the printed materials as well.

The bilingual logic is central to the system: across all touchpoints, content is structured so that Portuguese appears at the top in blue and set with Brazilian typeface Elza Round, while Japanese sits below in red set with M PLUS Rounded. The colors directly reference the national flags, but primarily function as a consistent reading code across the entire communication system.

As an extension of this experience, custom eki stamps were created for each artwork. As visitors move through the exhibition, they can collect these marks, turning the visit into a progressive physical record of the show while revealing the paths each person chooses along the way.

The exhibition Acervo de Histórias: Fazeres em Movimento brings together 44 works created by artists who have taken part in the Espaço de Tecnologias e Artes (ETA – Sesc Santo André) over the years. Everything emerges from processes experienced in workshops, courses, and educational activities. The exhibition highlights productions by 35 artists, artisans, and art educators who participated in ETA at different moments in their trajectories.

Visual identity for the exhibition Inezita Barroso: 100 anos de viola e pioneirismo for Sesc Mogi das Cruzes.

The show about Inezita Barroso (1925–2015) and “100 Years of Viola and Pioneering” is presented by Sesc Mogi das Cruzes to mark the artist’s centennial and bring together fifteen activities in her honor. The concept is anchored in enraizamento (“rootedness”), inspired by a statement Inezita made to Revista Brasil: “Something without roots flies away; the wind takes it and it disappears.” In her performances, Inezita was often seen wearing floral dresses, full skirts, and scarves, elements associated with traditional attire from Brazil’s countryside. The visual identity draws on this symbolic dimension by placing vernacular rural prints and folk embroidery at the center of the graphic system. The full booklet is available for download.

The visual identity for the inauguration of Sesc Franca brings the typographic experimentation of its workshops to large-scale screens and supports. The entire graphic was developed using the procedural animation software Cavalry. BVH Eiffel by André Baldinger and Fanny Hamelin from BVH Type brings the complex architecture of the new building to the visual identity.

The fifth edition of Sesc Jazz showcased contemporary musical productions linked to jazz, popular instrumental music, and improvisation. The event took place from October 18 to November 5, 2023, at Sesc Pompeia and Sesc 14 Bis.

The festival’s curatorial design tours countries where musical practices of African origin have deeply marked the territories bathed by the Atlantic. In this context, jazz functions as a form of opposition to colonial culture, an avant-garde black expression resulting from improvisation, sharing, and connection.

Giulia Fagundes explains that developing visuals to represent “the displacement of the center”, as proposed by the festival’s curators, and “assuming the symbolic place of contesting the power relations present within it” was the project’s greatest challenge. The goal was to bring the various paths of the Afro-diasporic culture and its aesthetic autonomies into a cohesive visual identity.

The graphic solution involved surveying references from posters promoting “Bailes Black”, dance balls organized in Brazil in the 1970s–80s, like the “Chic Show” parties in São Paulo. The political nature of these gatherings promoted an affirmation of the identity of black people in the diaspora and created a new way of occupying urban space through shared sound, a way of dressing and being in the world.

This visual exploration resonates with other references, such as the posters and newspapers of the Black Panther Party designed by Emory Douglas and the pamphlets from African independence movements of the same period. These references informed the festival’s illustrations, mainly through halftones, which convey the urgency and insurgency of serialized printing, valued for its speed and practicality.

Inspired by the typographic mix in the gathered materials, Giulia Fagundes chose Monopol and Monopol Kompakt by Nguyen Gobber as the main typefaces. Acumin by Robert Slimbach and Tiny by Jack Halten Fahnestock were used for supporting text.

The colors create contrasts and unexpected combinations that, together with the illustrations, define the visual language for various applications, including the festival’s printed materials, posters for decorating the venue, websites and promotional videos.

Design and art direction: Giulia Fagundes
Illustrations: Pedro Pessanha
Design printed materials: Thaíse Carvalho & Júlia França
Design digital materials: Wendel Anthuny & Tainá Simões
Motion / photography: Laís Dantas

Booklet for the theatrical play Fantasmagoria IV, directed by acclaimed Brazilian director Felipe Hirsch. The play premiered in São Paulo in 2024 and reflects on many subjects surrounding linguistics and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of art itself.

Solfa is used for the titles, paired with Pollen for the texts.

The identity for the inauguration of the new Sesc 14 Bis found the basis for new graphics in the glass grid of the facade. The bright color palette originates from the vai-vai samba school, which belongs to the surrounding area. NN Knit Grotesk, designed by Rüdiger Schlömer and available from Nouvelle Noire, recalls traditional lace techniques from northeastern Brazil. It is paired with Wigrum from Production Type.

The Bienal Sesc_Videobrasil is an exhibition that focuses on the work of artists from the world’s geopolitical South – Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East – in video art and various other artistic media.

The theme for the 22nd edition, which also celebrated the 40th anniversary of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, is a phrase by Brazilian poet Waly Salomão: “Memory is an island of editing”. The poet is known for his informality, the idea of lack of control and abandon. The verse speaks of memory as something that is not precise, that can be edited, in a fragmentary, random and shuffled fashion.

For the identity, we associated the idea of memory with the image of the glitch (error, visual noise). To represent this concept, we used Neue Television from nice to type. This typeface incorporates the horizontal lines of video playback into its design, which are normally invisible, suggesting an error or glitch.

The identity is composed as a typographic illustration, with fragments of text, noise, color and vibration in the background.

In the foreground, for the informative text, we used Area by Blaze Type, with its lean and uncomplicated design, to contrast with the complexity of Neue Television. For some texts including “A memória é uma ilha de edição”, Area was used with its geometric alternates.

The color palette chosen is reminiscent of the festive, vibrant and pop atmosphere of Waly Salomão’s universe.

Natureza em três versos (Nature in three verses) is the title of poetic interventions at Sesc Itaquera, in São Paulo, Brazil: haiku that interact with the environment to reflect on our rhythm and experience in the spaces and places we find ourselves.

From the importance of open spaces and distant from the chaos of the city after the period of isolation, the discreet and light poems spread throughout the space stimulate the search for poetry outside the screen and the virtual world.

The structure of three verses of traditional haiku was highlighted, with poems by Lígia Blat and the pioneer of haiku in Brazil, Afrânio Peixoto, that are mixed on the surfaces and present our relationship with the grandeur and details of nature: the connection of being and to sense.

Created in 1974, the Sesc Melhores Filmes Festival is the first film festival in the city of São Paulo. It offers the public the opportunity to watch what was most significant on the city’s screens in the previous year. The films shown are chosen democratically through public and critical voting. In 46 years of existence, the Sesc Melhores Filmes Festival has already shown hundreds of Brazilian and foreign feature films. In 2010, the festival innovated by being the first event of its kind to offer its programming with open caption audio description and subtitling services, accessibility features that will be offered in all of the films in this year's grid at CineSesc.

Using the language of projection, blurred images are overprinted, while the warm colors bring references to the Brazilian cinema, highlighting its political importance in 2019.

The festival logo was created by Bloco Gráfico in 2016 and is used for every edition. It’s not clear if it’s custom drawn or based on a font.

The Sesc Dance Biennial 2023 brought together dance and performance works that deal with dissident bodies. Based on videos of these presentations, studies were carried out on the abstraction of movement and the mechanics of joints, which resulted in the choice of ABC Galapagos, designed by Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb from Dinamo together with Felix Salut. The deconstruction of movements was reflected in the chromatic deconstruction of the use of the type in larger titles, posters and visual communication. The supporting typeface is GT America by Grilli Type (designed by Noël Leu with Seb McLauchlan).

Program cover

This year’s colorful identity for Brazilian film festival Sesc Melhores Films was created by editorial designers Paula Cruz and Lucas D’Ascenção, and motion designer Fernando Doti. The type palette features Map Roman Compressed for titles, Massilia for extended text, and JetBrains Mono for meta-information and running heads.

Here’s a little more about about the project from Paula Cruz:

Sesc Melhores Filmes is one of the most traditional film festivals in the city of São Paulo and in Brazil. For their 49th edition, the entire visual identity was designed referring to the movie theater where the event would take place. The objects present in the cinema, such as the box office and movie tickets, were essential references for the construction of the identity, animation and the catalogue. The final result is a dynamic material that values both the various winners and selections of the festival, from digital to paper.

Map Roman is the perfect typeface to shout out big news in both contemporary and classical styles. Boldly condensed, sophisticatedly avant-garde serif.

Program chapter head

Film listing

Chapter head

Film listing

Film listing

Chapter head

Film listings

Content

Environmental graphics

Environmental graphics in action

Poster

Instagram post

Instagram post

Instagram post

Sesc is a Brazilian non-profit institution that values education as a prerequisite for social transformation, and provides courses aimed at all age groups and social strata, and are often free.

The bi-monthly booklets announce the courses and workshops offered at Sesc 24 de Maio, a São Paulo chapter of the organisation. Its programme ranges from silkscreen workshops to open talks about LGBT and civil rights, and classes given by indigenous people of Brazil sharing their culture. Since several workshops continue from one month to another, the system was designed to make two different covers in one booklet by simply moving the booklet flaps. The covers were printed using only a few spot colours at a time, the colours were chosen by combining one fluorescent spot color with a solid one, experimenting with overprinting.

For the internal pages, the rule was to make it very simple and agile to typeset. The typefaces used are Atlas Grotesk and Atlas Typewriter for all the text, plus Whitney Index for captions.

Palco Giratório’s 2018 edition was conceived by the national Sesc team. This project aims to spread scenic arts to various regions in Brazil, especially the ones with less access to artistic expression.

The fonts in use are Dharma Gothic for headlines, combined with EB Garamond and Fabrikat Mono for paragraphs and subtitles, as well as VCR OSD Mono to create graphic images and forms.

Transbordar: Transgressions of Embroidery in Art was an exhibition that presents an overview of historical and contemporary works of art in Latin America that reflect on the place of embroidery in art history.

Historically, embroidery was an activity much relegated to the condition of a “minor art”, contrary to what happened with painting and sculpture, which were then qualified as “fine arts”. The showcased body of work subverts the perception of embroidery as a “sensitive, delicate, feminine art”, in an attempt to stimulate critical thinking when it comes to genre hierarchies, both social and artistic. The exhibition aimed to discuss the idea of embroidery not as feminine activity but a language that encourages thinking about different types of violence: against the youth population, gender violence, racial violence, asylum violence, fat-shaming — so widespread in contemporary society.

The visual identity intended to present a strong but still delicate arrangement of forms and repetition: typography as in the back and reverse of the embroidery. The main typeface is VOIR by Pompe Hedengren and Göran Söderström, used here with simple interferences that reinforce the idea of ​​threads and ramifications.

Longer texts use Graphik by Christian Schwartz.

In 2019, the Mostra de Arte da Juventude (MAJ, “Youth Art Exhibition”) celebrated its 30th anniversary and Sesc invited us to develop the project’s new logo, as well as the visual identity and signage of the commemorative edition. Following the format of traditional art salons, the exhibition sheds light on contemporary young art production. Currently, it is one of the main cultural events in the interior of the state of São Paulo and places the city of Ribeirão Preto on the brazilian’s visual arts map.

The new MAJ logo was designed combining geometric shapes with ink traps that pushes it away from a typically modernist solution. The highlight is the character M, which gains an extra “leg” to reproduce the boost given to MAJ’s featured artists. The typefaces in use are Space Grotesk and Basis Grotesque.

The 30-year edition’s visual identity simultaneously plays tribute to the new artists discovered and the city of Ribeirão Preto. We created a series of graphics that refer to sparks, representing young talents at the time of expansion and professional growth, as well as Ribeirão’s powerful sun.

Dramaturgias #1 is a publication about contemporary Brazilian theatre, a record of several activities held at Sesc Ipiranga throughout 2019.

Sesc is a non-profit institution that has 43 units in São Paulo alone, and around 600 across all 27 Brazilian states. Providing health assistance, leisure, sports, culture and education services for all age groups and social strata, that are often free or inexpensive.

While artists in Brazil are under severe attack by the current right-wing government, it was both a big responsibility and a privilege to work on such a project. The main attraction of the publication would be the exposed binding, matching the cover's bright-red 032 U Pantone. Everything was printed in CMYK + one spot color.

Type-wise, we went with Druk for all titles, Lyon Text for running-text and Graphik for dialogues, all available from Commercial Type. Maison Mono appears on page numbers and running titles.

Series of posters for the exhibition of artist Wallace Pato at Sesc Paraty. The project aims to show how intersections are used in the his large panels.