Challenge

The 30th Bienal de São Paulo built its curatorial premise on the idea of constellation, art and ideas linked through a shifting network of relationships, not one fixed theme. A conventional single-designer poster and logo would have missed the point. The Bienal needed a visual identity that behaved like a constellation itself.

Solution

Instead of commissioning one studio, the Bienal ran a national open call and selected 30 designers for an intensive one-week workshop in São Paulo. Together we built the Constellar system, a generative sign made of four intersecting line segments that reads simultaneously as the roman numeral XXX and a net of relationships, paired with the Constellar Mono Type Family, a "family" made of any existing or future monospaced font. Each of the 30 participants then designed one 60×90cm poster for the event using this shared rule set, producing related but distinct results instead of one fixed logo.

Success

30 designers, 30 posters, one shared identity. Each poster ran in a print of 200 copies, 6,000 posters in total, sent to press and released for public download at Portal Bienal. The Constellar Sign and Mono Type Family were adopted as the Bienal's official visual identity, handed off to its in-house design team to extend across the catalog and wayfinding.