Rodolfo França's photostream  

Cover of the #311 issue of INFO Exame, the best Brazilian magazine about business & technology.

After a whole year experiencing the joys of designing magazines for tablets, this is my return to print. Art Director Rafael Costa invited myself to design the very first App Guide of INFO magazine. In the beggining, the idea was for a special issue but in the end it came up as a regular newstand monthly issue, which really puts a smile on my face.

The briefing delivered asked for the development of a premium product, combining clever use of typography with white-space intelligence, in order to achieve refined elegance.

I came up with the cover idea of a rubik-app's cube after focusing on the rounded shape of application icons, which seemed a bit odd but kind of mandatory on this matter. Got myself into my studio and started flicking magazines, searching for the rounded pattern until I saw Time's magazine "Pakistan cover" featuring the american and pakistan flags as a rubik's cube pattern (you can check it at the great coverjunkie blog here).

Bingo! The idea of mixing and combining column blocks fit perfectly to the idea of setting up a group of applications in order to have the perfect smartphone. Basic idea is that there's no rule to complete the puzzle as there's no rule to combine apps and organize your smartphone and your life.

After having the cover's concept approved by the Editors, I asked 3D modellist and Photoshop master Marcelo Biscola at ArtNet Digital to unleash the fury and let it happen.

Huge thanks to long-time mate Oga Mendonça for his great effort on helping me out during proofing and checking at the end of the process. Also a big thanks to INFO's design team: Yana Parente, Wagner Rodrigues and Vinicius Neves.

www.info.abril.com.br

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3D model by Marcelo Biscola/ArtNet Digital

December 2011

Designed the iPad version of INFO Exame issues 309 and 311 along with the magazine's art team and freelance designer Maykol Arancibia.

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Art Director: Rafael Costa
Art Editor: Oga Mendonça
Designers: Yana Parente, Wagner Rodrigues, Vinicius Neves & Maykol Arancibia

You can buy the issues at:
itunes.apple.com/br/app/info-exame/id433176322?mt=8

November and December 2011

Designed the iPad version of SUPER's issues 298, 299 and 300 along with the magazine's art team. Nice design adaptation (print to ipad) by Jorge Oliveira, makes it really easy to transport the content from the print version to the iPad one.

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Art Editors: Renata Steffen & Jorge Oliveira
Designers: Rafael Quick, Renata Miwa, Raphael Galassi & Patrícia De Michelis

You can buy the issues at:
itunes.apple.com/br/app/superinteressante/id426935325?mt=8

from October to December 2011

From January to October 11' I´ve been busy working on the launch of iPad version of GQ Brasil, which finally arrived in Brazil in April 2011. I was told it was the first mag in the world to be launched with both print and tablet version simultaneously. It is also Condé Nast first release in the country as Edições Globo Condé Nast (a joint venture with Editora Globo).

Its been quite a challenge to develop the iPad version, with all its concerns. First of all, researching the way people aproach to the iPad it selfs. What readers want from an iPad version of a fashion magazine? How do they read on the iPad? How do they interact with the tablet, with the content? Plenty of other concerns comes to mind, a part from technical issues like typeface hinting size and contrast, ways of editing by design, reading points and entries...

You can download the app and the first five issues for free at:
itunes.apple.com/us/app/gq-brasil/id422859062?mt=8

Spread from Guia de Biodiversidade ("Biodiversity Guide"), a guide published by Editora Abril's Planeta Sustentável, a public web portal of sustainability.

We had a week to start this 36 pages guide from scratch.

The guide was a piece of the whole Planeta Sustentável campaign, so we had to use the same colour palette and typefaces from the previous works. The format was the same as National Geographic Magazine, so basically I studied National's grid system and columns uses in order to adjust the kind of information I had into this guide design.

But I wanted to explore the format a little bit further than the classic way National Geographic Magazine does. We were developing something fresh and new, so I thought it would be a good idea to try different ways from the flagship.

And we did. Things like extend/extrapolate the photo on the single page, strong use of the white space, different text column sizes, strong contrast between image and text, it would all differ the design of National Geographic Magazine with the guide we were developing.

One of the highlights of this project was certainly having the chance to work with such amazing pictures from the Brazilian nature and we tried to develop a design in which the astonishing images would have the highest importance in the spread balance.

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made with Flávia Sakai at MondoYumi Studio
photos by Luciano Candisani

August 2010