Eduardo Recife Finds His Footing

Hometown: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Websites: EduardoRecife.com (commerical work), MisprintedType.com (personal work)
For Fans Of: Adriana De Barros, grunge typography, Man Ray

One of Eduardo Recife’s earliest artistic memories is of a robbery. One night after dark, he and a friend were midway through their first attempt at pixaçao, a Brazilian graffiti style, when thieves ambushed them, took their shoes and told them to run. “We were 13, skinny and wussies,” Recife says. “We ran.”

His shoes were gone, but not his creative spirit. Recife, now 29, has become a prolific illustrator, collage artist, font designer and photographer with a bevy of high-profile clients like The New York Times, HBO and Panic At The Disco. Recife is careful to delineate between his personal work and commercial work (he has separate websites for the two, and declares that his personal site “is my playground!”), but both are well-regarded in the admittedly niche world of design blogs. “What made his work stand out was the looseness and spontaneity of it,” says John Martz, editor of illustration blog Drawn! “None of his work looks labored, yet it still has a very cohesive style.”

Recife’s collages blend typography, vintage photographs and illustrations with his own drawings. The aesthetic of the latter is simultaneously lush and barren, beautiful and grotesque. He admits that images of his home country—from distressed typography on signs to vernacular paintings on walls—have influenced his designs. “Brazil, apart from its problems, is such a beautiful place,” he says. “It is definitely a source of influence in my work—the colors, the people, the mountains, the ocean, the bright blue sky.”