Brazilian modern graphic design had its start during the fifties and sixties, when the first Brazilian design schools were established. Its educational model came from Germany and Switzerland, as for the rest of Latin America. At that time, visual identity, signs and logos were the mainstream of graphic design. Some decades later, that very precise design production, so connected to an international and universal approach, gave birth to another kind of graphic language, when a kind of a softening of modernist dogma took place.
From the 60’s to the 21st century, many things happened in Brazilian graphic design, but modernism still remains as a refuge to good projects.

Evelyn Grumach is a graphic designer who has been working on a most diversed range of graphic design problems for more than 30 years. Her studio was one of the first ones in Brazil to begin to challenge the modernist language dogma. She also has been teaching for the last years at PUC-Rio, a major institution of design education in Rio de Janeiro. Among other projects of all kind and dimensions, she was responsible for the logo design of the United Nations Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992.

João de Souza Leite is a designer and educator. He divides his time as a teacher between two major institutions of design education in Rio de Janeiro – ESDI and PUC-Rio. After working for almost 40 years covering different areas of design, he is concerned with design research, whereas certain relationships between design and society in Brazil draws most of his attention by now. He got his PhD in Social Sciences, always thinking about current design field trends.

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