BORDALO II

AdobeIndesign editorial editorial design graphic design InDesign magazine Portugal portuguese Primary colors print

“BORDALO II” is an academic project that I had the opportunity to design using Adobe InDesign for the first time, which was very exciting for me. This work features the life and work of the portuguese artist Artur Bordalo, best know as Bordalo II. All the text is available online in P55 Magazine's website. I do not own the rights for any of the photos used in this project - all the authors were given proper credit.

I started my gathering some photos of Bordalo’s work, and some bank images of colorful plastic. From seeing all of the artist's work, it made sense to me to use a bold primary color palete.

Finding the best typeface was a bit of a trial and error process - and surely the hardest part of this work. I started by choosing a serif font for the big blocks of text. Then I look up for something bold and heavy for the subtitles. I thought of using a script graffiti font for that and/or the quotes, but it wasn't very legible. Finally, finding a good typeface for chapter numbers and titles was the trickiest part. I ended up finding one that I liked in a magazine that I bought - VVDS Rashfield. Unfortunately, the numbers didn't please me as well, so I ended up chosing another one for that purpose.

When I was looking for colorful plastic images, I came up with the concept for the magazine cover. Basically, I wanted to mimic Bordalo’s work, using a photo of his face and plastic shapes that would mimic his facial features. I first tried out with triangle cutouts but then it made more sense to work with cutouts in more organic shapes.

Then I was looking for colorful plastic images and I came up an idea, that I made use for designing the magazine cover, using Adobe Illustrator. Basically, I thought of mimicking Bordalo’s work, using a photo of his face and some colorful plastic shaping some of his facial features.