Book’s graphic project – Creation, conceptualization and execution of the entire project, including the diagramming of the whole book, illustration and cover.

 

Publication that groups the articles that have been published through the year by the President of the National Confederation of Commerce of Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC)¹, Antonio Oliveira Santos, the articles of this book has been edited by the CNC’s Economic Councilor, Ernane Galvêas (former Minister of the Treasury of Brazil (1980-1985) and former President of the Central Bank of Brazil (1968-1974 and 1979-1980). This project has been following the new guidelines of the CNC Publication Standardization Project (a project has been implemented in 2016)².

 

 

Before I have been receiving the material for the layout of the book, I have been called for a meeting with the CNC’s Economic Councilor, Ernane Galvêas, who was responsible for the editing and the organization of the publication. He has shown me a sheet of newspaper with a picture of a train leaving a tunnel, with very little depth and no perspective, which it has been the proposal for the cover, a choice what it has made by the President of the entity and himself, I have just had to improve the idea, and the book still should have a title, then, it has been “Exiting the crisis”, together with the photo, they have been forming a briefing of a projection of the better times that its significate to come for all the commerce sector and to the country, because it was the President’s book, the maximum hierarchy of a sector that gathers a significant part of the country’s workmanship. This theme has chosen because, in mid-2015, Brazil had entered an economic crisis from would not to find the way to come out, the idea of the directors have been to give an air of optimism.

 

Two weeks later I have received all the text for the book, I have sent it for the first revision, after a week later, I have received the revised source texts, then, I have diagrammed the book first and sent it again for a second revision, befora it, I had already started to develop the illustration of the train for the cover, I have been choosing colours, creating gradients and shadows to be to presented everything together to the coordinator of the job, the CNC’s Economic Councilor.

 

As I do with all the covers, I have been importing the .psd file into Illustrator, from Photoshop, and I have been inserting everything that would to go into it (title, subtitle, logos on the front and back of the cover, text on the spine, codebar, etc.). Next, I have started working on the varnish, I have been starting to create the texture from the front of the area where the train’s conductor is located, trying to maintain the line of the President’s previous book, which had been published a year before, a layer of localized varnish that would fill the whole cover (there is an image of the varnish in the image’s area below this text), how if it has been coming waves out of the train, trying to accentuate the process of transformation that would to be coming. The idea has been to transmit, with the train and the varnish, the sensation of the “opportunity has been now”, it would to be the magic moment of changing, and I have been aligning this texture to each wagon of the train, giving the understanding that the train would be the conductor of the transformation process of that moment. This President’s book has been the first to be following the Project of Standardization of the CNC Publications, it has published in 2017.

 

In this publication has not been graphic accompaniment of the printing process, because the work has done in a larger press company in São Paulo, Stilgraf, and I were living in Rio de Janeiro, however, this press company has had a very good quality control process, it has been giving myself the security to accompany just the digital proofs. When the work has arrived, I have known the President has liked it very much and proudly he has been distributing the books. Few months later, the CNC’s Economic Counselor, Ernane Galvêas, he has caught my arm and standing next to the President, he has said: “this is the designer who makes your books”, the President has smiled and said: “your work is very good”.

 

1 National Confederation of Commerce of Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC – cnc.org. br) – Patronal syndical entity, which groups 34 Federations in the whole Brazilian territory, 27 referring to their respective states in Brazil and 7 of these 34 at national level, there are more than five million companies represented in the commerce that generate around 25.5 million direct and formal jobs, it acts in order that the sector is always present at the formulation of public policies, following the progress of the proposals of interest in the National Congress of Brazil and in the defense of the Constitution of Brazil, always it having in focus the laws that may impact the segment. 

 

The CNC was founded at 4th September of 1945, its current President is José Roberto Tadros, who succeeded Antonio Oliveira Santos, in an election that was held in 2018, and it is responsible for the administration of two institutions of great performances in Brazil and that form one of the largest systems of social development in the world, the institution of Commerce Social Service (Sesc – sesc.com.br) and the institution of National Service of Commercial Learning (Senac – senac.br), the first mentioned, with social projects, such as Mesa Brasil, Ecos Program of sustainability etc. (acts in the following areas: Alimentation, Culture, Education, Health, Leisure, Social Assisntence, Sports, Sustainability etc.) and the second in assisting the training and qualification of employees of the companies in the commerce sector (shopkeepers, waiters, chefs, hoteliers etc.).

 

2 Project of Standardization of the CNC’s Publications – A project in which the head of the Communications Office, Cristina Calmon, journalists from the sector and four designers from the CNC (myself included), together with an external communications office and a graphic design office hired studied all the publications produced in the entity to date, creating a line of reasoning, comparing them with each other, segmenting the various types of content of the entity and creating a harmony in relation to the new visual identity of the CNC (launched in 2012), creating a catalogue, etc. The publications were divided into groups: 1) Technical books; 2) Author’s books; 3) Reports; 4) Manuals; 5) Magazines; 6) Digital newsletters and digital publications.