Estúdio Lógos

through bamboo, we were invited to design 9 mini-magazines to promote 4 projects by the construction company idea!zarvos—the leading name in quality real-estate architecture in são paulo.

the whole process was mediated by an advertising agency, which made everything more difficult, especially the covers.

the project involved 4 different sets of 6 magazines (5 fixed, and one that changed with each set). each set was packaged in a cardboard box. this was our design for the box cover.

the box cover was an overlapping of those designed for the five ‘fixed’ magazines.

the ‘cidade’ (city) folder spoke about urban transformations; ‘bairro’ (neighborhood), about the region in which the developments were taking place; ‘design’, about furnishings and interior decoration; and ‘zarvos’, about the construction company itself. there were four different versions of the last magazine, one about each project under development.

we proposed a different color for each, with short typographical titles. the color of the spine would set the folders apart inside the box.

The covers were not exclusively typographical, as each featured semi-transparent photographs and catchwords interspersed among the letters of the title.

we also proposed back covers with title add-ons—‘change the city’; ‘live the neighborhood’ ‘idea!zarvos’, etc.

despite the client’s enthusiasm—they wanted to run a series of posters and t-shirts with the box-cover image—the covers became a veritable battlefield with the agency, and a pretext for their tampering with the project.

sadly, the magazines ended up with covers that bore no resemblance to our graphic design, and which we’d rather not show here.

like the original covers, the whole graphic design was based on typography and colors (we also lost the colors on the covers, which were decided by the agency).

taking our lead from zarvos’ architecture, we thought of a flexible design, with a freer and more varied layout, albeit with an underpinning structure.

inside, the font used on the cover was reduced by half for large titles and down to a quarter size for the contents, page numbers and smaller titles.

the brochure on urban transformations spoke of certain key neighborhoods around the world

the grid we designed facilitated the use of images measuring 2x3 and 3x4, with strong horizontal lines hedging page-wide images.

in this example, the area above the text is squared, just like the larger photos at the bottom.

the project was an experiment with obtaining the smallest, narrowest spacings possible between lines and letters and, more importantly, among images and between images and text boxes.

this was one of the reasons why we used upper case, as it defines top-lines more clearly, allowing for narrower ‘between’ spaces.

the neighborhood brochure was about vila ipojuca and contained interviews with residents and a sort of mini local guide, etc.

as you can see here, the minimal spacings required subdued, horizontal accents.

here is an example of two single pages with different content.

for this brochure, we designed a large map of the region.

here is the contents page for the brochure on design and interiors.

and a double-page spread.

the contents page for the brochure on architecture, which introduced the 4 studios behind the zarvos projects for vila ipojuca.

a double-page spread from this brochure.

as we dispensed with internal margins, images that spilled over from one page to another could continue in the proper proportion.

here is the contents page for the idea!zarvos brochure.

... and a double-page spread from the same magazine.

lastly, the closing spread, with the credits.

we decided to put all the image credits together at the end, so that each brochure had one full credits page followed by another full of quotations from collaborators and interviewees, etc.