Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 24, 2024: Elaine Ramos, a Brazilian graphic designer (#2185)

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Artist of the Day, December 24, 2024: Elaine Ramos, a Brazilian graphic designer (#2185)

Elaine Ramos (1974) is a Brazilian graphic designer. She grew up without any knowledge of design—and perhaps even more surprisingly, she grew up in a house largely devoid of books. Moreover, Ramos’ homeland of Brazil didn’t offer public higher education in the commercial arts while she was in school, and, not knowing that graphic design even existed, she wound up studying architecture at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo.

She hated the timelines inherent in the world of architecture; it took years to design a building, and still more to see it constructed, if it ever even made it to that stage. “I became much more interested in restraining my design to smaller objects, so that I could hold them, so that I could control every detail—or have the illusion of control,” she says.

In 1997, she worked on her first book cover in partnership with her school’s imprint. After she graduated, she got a job on the architecture book line at Cosac Naify, the Brazilian publisher known for its lavishly designed art and academic titles. It was here, Ramos says, that her lifelong “love affair” with books began. Her architecture training wasn’t a total waste, though. “It made me think more structurally,” she says. “My focus is not only at the surface, but at the materials, the functioning, the industrial processes.”

Only after ensuring that she has laid the foundation of a solid interior concept on which to bring a book’s best ideas to life—via design, paper selection, careful consideration of the overall tactile experience—will she move on to the cover, which she regards as a total synthesis of everything within. Ramos considers her decade-plus career at Cosac Naify as a rich, experimental lab in her development, and when the house closed in 2015, she carried the lessons she absorbed over to the new publishing venture she co-founded, Ubu.

Elaine Ramos's story is interlaced with that of the publishing company Cosac Naify, for whom she works as Art Director. She has helped coordinate their influential series of books about graphic design, transforming the publisher into one of the main centres of production and reflection on the subject in Brazil, and her style and vision has made their graphic identity one of the most coherent and refreshing in the Brazilian editorial market.
Belonging to the generation that grew up during the cultural and political renewal following the end of Brazil's dictatorship, she assimilated in her work both tropicalista influences and certain Modernist principles, which had previously been reduced to stale dogmas. The result is a series of projects with a rare mix of sobriety and experimentation.

Her generation is one of the first to work fully in the digital era, but which also dedicated itself to the investigation of materials and forms, as well as obsolete printing techniques.

A member of the Brazilian team at the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), Ramos has earned numerous international awards, such as AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers prize, for O Livro Amarelo do Terminal. -- Paulo Werneck

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