Maria Margarida

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Sebastião Rodrigues

Jun 7, 2016

Let me talk about a challenge that I was given during my last semester - to create a new dynamic identity for a 20th century Portuguese designer - Sebastião Rodrigues. First things first, I had to do a lot of research about Sebastião’s life, his work and his way of thinking about design. We can find some information about him on the Internet and also watch some interviews of him. In addition to this, I also searched in books, particularly in “Sebastão Rodrigues” - Coleção Designers Portugueses. I quickly realized that he was extremely cautious with his work and that he had a revolutionary mind for his time as he was one of the pioneers of Graphic Design in Portugal. He deeply valued his drafts (and the entire process of creating his work), so he always saved his drafts instead of throwing them away. I confess that I felt a connection with him in this matter, since I too like to keep all of my drafts (people can learn a lot from drafts!). After I discovered that Sebastião used the same symbol in various projects, I decided that I would create my grid around this symbol:

Once the grid was finished, I came up with the typography using different parts of his work, and worked on the letters "S" and "R" as they were his name's initials. As soon as I finished these, I wrote a Processing program to make the project more dynamic. With my Processing program, I am able to generate 49 different combinations of S's and R’s, such as these:

This last image was the final result I chose.