14 JUILLET
SÃO PAULO / BRAZIL
An institutional date can be the starting point for a new visual language.
Photography by Flaviano Vaz and Regularswitch
The official Bastille Day celebration in São Paulo, held at the Pinacoteca. 14 July is the French national day, marking the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the beginning of the French Revolution. The event brings together the French community and its Brazilian partners, with established institutional codes and an audience that recognises them instantly. We created the visual identity, the art direction and the graphic system for the event.
To honour the institutional weight of the date without falling into its obvious symbols. The meeting of two cultures could not be illustrated. It needed a language able to hold it.
We started with the building. The Pinacoteca is made of exposed brick, repeated arches and a light that shifts from hour to hour inside the rooms. We took three things from it: a rhythm, a module and a way of letting empty space do the work. That grammar became the base of the system, with heritage and the contemporary on the same plane.
The identity kept the official character of the date without giving up experimentation. The generative prototype remains a studio tool, available for other cultural contexts.
