ALL CATS ARE

GREY IN THE

DARK

Hello!I’m Rita Brito and I’m a Communication Designer. I’m passionate about design and I see myself as a hard-worker with meticulous attention to detail.

After my graduation at the Oporto School of Fine Arts I started a one-year internship as a designer at a food company where I acquired the ability to work within a team, to manage tight schedules as well as to deal with real clients.

I have a particular interest in illustration and edi-torial design, two of the areas in which I look forward to learn more and more.

At the moment I’m a member of Heart of Glass, a nonprofit cultural organization that organized the fi-nal year students’ exhibition from the Oporto School of Fine Arts in 2010.

In this book you can see a few of the most impor-tant examples of what I’ve been working on, from academic to professional projects.

RITA BRITO

www.ritabrito.commailtoritabrito@gmail.com

BIRDS06

BOOKLETS18

SWIM’N FIT12

CARS26

ASTHMA MASCOT32

DESIGN AGAINST FUR10

CRAZY GAME14

THE CHICKEN30

SEDUCTION36

T-SHIRTS22

BAZOOKA40

MADE IN BUNCH50

THE OWL46

CLOSE-UP54

PRESSURE42

ROUTA48

CANDY BOY52

BIRDS

06

This work relies on the appropriation of the aesthetics and humor characteristics of the Lolcatz, a phenomenon that has spread through the Internet and is based on the attri-bution of human traits in animals, cats, in this case. Thus, through photographs of birds, tak-en by me, I created a sort of Lolbirdz. The birds were chosen for their funny expressions easily identifiable with human moods.

In order to connect the text to the image, I approached this relation in different ways in all of the four posters.

In the What?! poster the relations between text and image were established by the use of color and different weights in the typeface.Dancing Queen is a visible reference to the Abba’s single. The waving of the black-swan’s feather suggest a dance, reinforced by the use of typography.

O RLY? is a reference to an online phenomenon, a kind of Lolcatz this time with owls, because their expression in pictures is always like Oh, really?. Here the O works as the frame where the poster’ star stands and RLY? works almost like a label for the animal facial and corporal expression.Guess Who? is again a reference to a game that emphasizes the mystery visible in the headless flamingo. Here, the typography is related to one of the animal’s characteristics: the feet, by its slim and fragile design.

DESIGN AGAINST FUR

10

This poster was made for the 2008 Design Against Fur contest, that aims to sensitize the designers for political and ethic issues. The message of the contest is that wearing fur is cruel and unnecessary so I decided to go for an objective approach to the subject by creating a simple and iconic image, easy for everyone to understand.

The main idea of the poster it that you can wear everything you want without loosing your soul or your heart through choosing fur. Thus, the design was based on children’s toy pieces, sprues, that convey to the major one, the heart, the piece that everyone should want to keep.

SWIM’ N FIT

12

I was asked to design the corporate identity for a gym targeted for children and teenagers.

Due to the age group it was intended to I chose to go for a funny approach which is vis-ible in the name and logo, as well as in the hole identity.

The name compounds the two main op-tions of the gym: swimming and fitness classes so, also the icon created had to represent both of this two activities. The design relies in three basic colors that children are familiarized with: yellow, red and blue and the general identity aims to make children want to go to the gym because it’s supposed to be a funny activity.

I was asked to design the letterhead, the DL envelope and the business cards for the teach-ers. I also made some stickers to offer the kids.

CRAZY GAME

For this project I was asked to select a brand known by a specific piece of clothing and then to create an illustration based on the brand’s language.

I elected Throttleman, well-known for its men boxer shorts with funny illustrations, and then selected a theme to work on: video games.

To get closer to the brand’s identity I had to analyze their illustrations, searching for its strengths. Thus, I got to the point where I established the three main visible features: a main character doing a funny action and with a humorous expression; a background for the character, soft but significant on telling the story and the use of typography for the title.

All of the elements present in the illustra-tion resemble video games or games in general, from Pac-Man to target and console games. To follow Throttleman’s ideology, my illustration has a lot of movement and colors. I applied the illustration to boxer shorts and t-shirts.

14

I created a second option for the t-shirt printing, this time with printed front and back.

BOOKLETS

18

This two booklets were made during an InDe-sign workshop in Helsinki and these are two basic exercises on typography and editorial design.

The 10 Best Magazines in the World is sup-posed to be a magazine supplement with a brief history of printing and design industry, the elements needed to make a great maga-zine and the top 10 magazines. In this booklet I wanted to combine illustration, typography and photography.

The What has landscape architecture and industrialized society to learn from indigenous cultures and their symbiotic relationships with nature? booklet is an exercise on the use of photography and its relations with grids and typography. I started the exercise with a John Williams’ essay and then, as its topic was land-scape architecture and its relationships with nature, I decided to photograph the Alvar Aal-to vases for Iittala. I chose this vases because Aalto attached to them an organic essence that resembles the finnish lakes and other natural shapes. The colors of the vases were the foun-dation for the whole booklet, where I wanted the typography to be discrete and let the beauty of the images stand-out.

T-SHIRTS

22

These are two of some illustrations made for t-shirts. I chose this two drawings because of their different approaches to the same theme: animals.

In the first drawing, with the french bull-dog I explored calligraphic lines, resembling watercolor and created a repetition broke only by the colors of the dog collars.

In the elephants illustration I chose a much more straight approach with very geo-metric and simplified shapes that can, at the same time, give the idea of movement.

CARS

These pictures are the result of several initial exercises for the Photography classes on ex-perimenting shutter speed and diaphragm opening.

The aim of this pictures was to capture a chosen subject in two ways: first with slow shutter speed, in order to obtain a blurred mo-tion image; second with fast shutter speed to freeze that same movement.

Because the exercise itself is very simple and has very predictable results, I wanted to chose a theme that could originate nice pic-tures. The die-cast toy cars race worked out very well because due to its small size, the in-creased scale made them look like real cars in an insane race.

26

On the left: slow shutter speed.On the right: fast shutter speed.

THE CHICKEN

This booklet is an exercise done during an In-Design workshop in which we were asked to tell a story through images.

I chose to go for illustration made from ty-pographic elements to tell the story of a chick-en, A Galinha, who has two chicks, Pintos. The sequence of illustrations intents to show the steps before the chicks come out of the eggs in a didactical and appealing way.

30

ASTHMA MASCOT

I was asked to design a mascot to represent the Asthma Association dedicated to children that suffer from that disease. The only constrain was that it had to be an animal.

Thus, I chose a dog as my mascot, because almost every kid likes dogs and they are know to be very friendly and helpful. This dog is blowing soap bubbles as a metaphor for the disease. The aim of this mascot is to show that everyone can have a normal life with asthma and even kids with the disease can blow soap bubbles.

32

I tried out several color schemes until the final one. Orange is a color that represents enthusiasm, happiness and encouragement, important feelingsfor kids with asthma.

I also made other experiences with some of my typical illustrations with the same asthma subject. In this case the animal is represented through a mask a kidis wearing.

Since I was in Finland at the time,as an Erasmus student, I made a version of the preceding illustrations with another theme, the snow.

SEDUCTION

This is a professional work I did during my in-ternship in a food company. In the briefing I was asked to create a gourmet range of thirteen jams, four wine jellies and three fruit liqueurs.

The brand already had a gourmet range characterized by foil printed gold, so the alter-native for this one was to use silver, which was the foundation for all of the design materials.

Based on the royal nature of silver I chose to create a classic and simple logo that accen-tuates the seductive intention of the range. To achieve that seductiveness, the labels are based in three colors: black, light grey and foil silver; here the pictures of the fruit stands out as the only colored element.

For this product range I also designed the Christmas package, in full black with details in foil silver and glossy varnish.

36

BAZOOKA

This is an academic project done in collabora-tion with a classmate, Mafalda Nobre. In the briefing we were asked to create the corporate identity for Bazooka, a marketing agency with a low budget for publicity, that didn’t want to emphasize the military character of their name.

We based all the work in the expression “ A little bird told me” because, due to the low

budget, the publicity would have to be spread by word of mouth.

Besides this, we also wanted to magnify the whispering that occurs in the agencies, where clients and marketeers discuss the campaigns so we designed two birds communicating with each other, kind of like whispering about the next campaign they’re promoting.

These two birds became part of the logo and they work at the same time as mascots for the brand. The idea is that these two birds spread around the stationery as well as around the offices and appear in all the brand’s events. In the letterhead, envelope and business cards the birds whisper you the informations about the agency.

40

PRESSURE

The aim of this project was to represent the word Pressure, in any of its meanings. I decided to portray the kind of pressure a human being suffers everyday, the tiredness, the despera-tion.

The way I wanted to show the concept was through facial expressions. To this I added the different hair colors, corresponding to each one of the facial expressions, to bring the pic-tures a more dramatic nature.

I wanted to create three stages for the hu-man reaction to the pressure so, in order to make that idea visible in the pictures, I formed three different groups of facial expressions and hair colors: the first one, with the blond hair, is apathy; the second one, with the blue hair, goes from apathy and blueness to a slight sense of despair; and the last one, represented by the red colored hair, is the total rebellion.

42

This project was featured at:www.filemagazine.com

THE OWL

This is a set of illustrations done for a website about Usability on the Web that needed an icon-ic image that would portray the whole concept of the website.

Since one of the major goals of usability is to give information to the user in a clear and concise way, I chose an owl for the icon, be-cause of its known wisdom. I tried out some different positions with the intent of allowing the owl to move around the website and make it more flexible and adaptable to the page lay-out.

46

ROUTA

This is a series of three packages for candies, each package for a different flavour.

The brand name is Routa, that means frosty in finnish so, the package had to reveal the can-dies frostiness. Thus, I thought of a diamond to accentuate that feature, because of its well-defined edges and transparency that, in some way, resembles the Nordic cold and frostiness.

The difference between the candies is giv-en by the colors of the diamonds, that are also the colors of the candies themselves.

48

MADE IN BUNCH

This illustration is a reaction to the challenge launched by the Bunch collective at their Made in Bunch website where they dared designers to produce a fresh reinterpretation of their logo.

Based on the name of their website, Made in Bunch, and on their actual logo character-ized by the letter B, I tried to attach to it a home-made feeling. So, I made an illustration of a let-ter B shaped biscuit and added the Homemade in Bunch inscription.

50

This project was featured at:www.madeinbunch.com

Based in what I did to the Bunch logo, I experimented another version with a typical biscuit shape and with the Bon Appetit inscription.

CANDY BOY

This two images were made to illustrate a text, given to think of it only as a story-board with the main ideas. With that generic text I had to create my own story, scenarios and characters.

The given text was the following: I come in and sit down, ask for the usual. I grab the news-paper, I look outside. I realize what’s across the street. I leaf through the newspaper. In one page I recognize what I saw across the street.

This illustrations were made for the begin-ning of my interpretation of the original story, in which a boy that loves all kind of sweets comes into a café and asks for the usual: a heart shaped lollipop. The drawings were made with watercolor and pencil on paper.

52

CLOSE-UP

Norma Desmond, walking down the stairs of her home, deliriously exclaims Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up. This scene marks the end of Sunset BLVD by Billy Wilder.

As Norma Desmond feels ready for her close-up, the young artists and designers from Oporto increasingly need to be in the spot-lights. In order to achieve this, new platforms must be created so that the merit and prestige of this young producers can be projected.

Heart of Glass, a nonprofit cultural organi-zation of which I’m a member, organized the final year students’ exhibition from the Oporto School of Fine Arts in July 2010.

As a member of a such a small team, con-sidering the amout of work that needs to be done for an exhibition, I had to take part in all of the decisions and actions but I even was more involved in the design issues and the pro-moting materials.

54

We selected different close-up images of the final year students for the various promoting materials. It’s visible in the poster used on the streets, the one for the metro or the leaflet.

This is the selling stand at the exhibition building.

The catalogue was divided into three main sections: the introduction with close-up pictures, critical texts and essays; the showcase of the exhibited works; and the ending with biographical notes and credits.

I designed the logo for Heart of Glass. Here you can see the one color logo as well as the adaptations for the Close-up exhibitions. The salmon one was for the 2010 exhibition and the green one is for this year exhibition.

Here is a preview of the close-up pictures for the 2011 exhibition.