Bola is a design institute which uses behavioral research as a premise to its projects. We believe that in investigating and understanding what happens in society in order to develop ideas which are in tune with its aspirations. This is the foundation for what we call meaningful design. We work with the same research methodologies used by our sister-company, Box 1824, and with a multidisciplinary structure that includes anthropologists, semioticians, photographers and, naturally, designers.
June 29th, 2008
To create the visual identity for the classic Brazil Vs. Argentina (which took place last June 18th, at the Mineirão Stadium), we tried to stay clear from the clichés of the sport’s iconography and explore the confontation of colors, with two dashes of paint in the nations’ colors (blue for Argentina and green for Brazil), as a symbol of the conflict and fight. The texture of paint suggests the grace and flow of the soccer movements, and the way the dashes meet resembles the letter “X” in Brazil x Argentina, as a symbol of the rivalry between the two teams.
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June 20th, 2008
The concept of citizen traveller was developed for the new fashion brand of Paramount Textiles. We went for the pillars behind great national and international fashion brands and discovered a universe still unexplored. A world of young urban men and women who mix leisure and work in trips, and are immersed in the trends of mobility and culture trading. Therefore, we named the brand Sky, Land and Sea, an allusion to the three means of traveling. The logo was designed as an emblem synthesizing these three elements, with their corresponding colors, like a flag for global citizens.
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June 19th, 2008
To change constantly, but always building a brand image. This proposal settled the design of movie production studio Movie&Art’s new visual identity. We thought of a simple and flexible graphic element which could be reinvented and not discarded at each new phase of the studio’s history. The line was chosen because it symbolizes connection, continuity. Because each story follows a line. The “&”, a symbol of connection which had already been used by the brand, was recovered in its logo. The “&” stands for a sum: a sum of directors and topics, brands and ideas, a concept that is present in all the projects offered by Movie&Art, whether they are commercial shorts or full-lenght films.
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May 19th, 2008
To filter the excess of information found in the Internet these days, selecting only what is interesting to each person. This was our goal when developing web application Spix.info, which allows users to access what’s new in his chosen websites and blogs in a single page, from any computer. Spix was conceived in order to offer time saving and practicality in the three main functions of the web: search, access to specialized content and connecting to people. It is a tool to track whatever is important for the user. If you want to be one of our first beta-testers please sign up here. Check back soon for more info on Spix.
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May 19th, 2008
Nokia’s concept ‘Music gets you talking’ was brought to life during travelling event Nokia Trends Mobjam 2007. After carrying on an investigation about the global e-music scene, we developed an environmentalization project based on lightting design, ecologically more correct, because it reduces waste of material.
Music Soul is a software that materializes a person’s musical aura. A system of sensors located near a projection screen captures the beat of the music and and the movement of the person close to that screen, turning these factors into dynamic graphics. These graphics are made up from patterns of circles, triangles and beams, which change according to two variables: music and movement.
Connection Map, on the other hand, is a system that connects people who dig the same kind of music. During the party, guests sent SMS messages containing the names of their favorite bands. The information was projected onto a large screen: people were symbolized by blue squares and bands by green circles, which grew in size according to the number of fans. Guests were linked to one another through their favorite bands. Definitely a good way to strike up conversation.
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May 16th, 2008
After an immersion in the environment of 9-12 year old children, we found out that the childish aesthetics, normally used in cereal packages is not the most admired and consumed by people in this age group. So we created the visual concept of the 1st Sucrilhos Water Balloon Championship Hot Site using an aesthetics that was cleaner, although still fun and childlike. Brighter colors, images of children posing with a model attitude and elements that resemble theme parks — such as moving targets like “shoot the duck” — have a stronger appeal to this target public, the tweens, term coined after the word between, since they are in between childhood and adolescence. We also explored the strategy of participation and collaborative content. Children could sign up online and publish videos, photos and comments before, during and after the championship.
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May 15th, 2008
The greatest challenge of this job was to turn something as mundane as rice into a symbol of sophistication and industriousness. We designed highly intricate, delicate patterns, with a handmade look for caterering company Arroz de Festa (the company’s name literally means Party Rice, a Brazilian idiom that refers to someone who is always around). Rice as an element references the brand name and pays a tribute to the values of simplicity and casualness. Just as the caterers’ chef believes rice can be used in several recipies, from entrées to dessert, our proposal is that the patterns be present in every instance of the brand’s contact with consumers: from staff uniforms and packaging to the automobile in which food is delivered.
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May 15th, 2008
We translated the brand’s universe in concrete ways for Brahma’s new brand book: The Red Book of Brahma. The wavy shape references to the logo’s movement. The cover was made from molded aluminum, painted red, to resemble the main consumption environment of beer: bar tables. We also created a note-taking system to simplify content updates, once the book represents the life of the brand, and therefore deserves to grow along with it.
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April 30th, 2008
The relationship between youth and football in Latin America is portrayed in this book we’ve created for Nike. Box1824 carried out a research with boys and girls from Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Bola was responsible for the images, taken by photographer Jacob Langvad, and by the graphic project. We visited four cities – São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Mexico City — in order to capture these youngsters’ relationship with football in images: how they play, what they wear, what the place they live in looks like. The green grass is represented by the texture of suede (material of which our cover was made) in the graphic project. The Nike brand was molded over a pattern made with one of the main symbols of football: the goal net.
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April 30th, 2008
The new website of NGO Iniciativa Verde (Green Initiative) was supposed to gather several types of information, from technical explanations to the history of carbon neutralizations that took place in Brazil. In order to make the content more organized and easier to access, we designed the web site’s structure as information drawers: summarized texts that develop when the user clicks the ‘more’ button. In that way, users can have an overview of the website, and have an in-depth view only on the subjects they are interested in. We also had an editorial reformulation which included, for example, a Q&A section, which instructively explains how carbon neutralization works and what the NGO does. In the website, people can also quickly calculate and neutralize their carbon emissions. We have developed a visual calculator that reveals how many trees it would take to neutralize CO2 emissions in several environments (flights, cars, homes). At the end of the calculation, each user can order the trees to be planted right there and then, thus taking part on the initiative.
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