Tupigrafia: the Brazilian type catalyst
Since 2000 this somewhat irregular publication based in São Paulo has been hitting its readers with a storm of letterforms. Here’s an interview with Claudio Rocha, one of its masterminds
Tupigrafia is proudly and definitely ‘a primeira e única revista de tipografia do Brasil’. The first and only Brazilian typographic magazine took off at the turn of the millennium in São Paulo and has been piloted ever since by graphic and type designers Claudio Rocha and Tony de Marco.
Only very few type mags can flaunt a twenty-year lifespan and this one continues to go strong. From September 2000 to January 2020 thirteen issues came out, first from the Bookmakers publishing house and then, starting from the seventh issue, from Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo (OTSP). For its creators Tupigrafia is not just a magazine, it’s a way of keeping in touch with people active in visual communication, exchanging ideas and experiences, which usually pop up as subject matter for new articles. Rocha and De Marco are intrinsically connected to the Brazilian community of designers, visual artists, communicators, researchers, teachers, calligraphers, street writers and letterpress people. And the same goes for the international community too. The outcome of the magazine in all its issues has always reflected the state of the typographic and lettering arts, in Brazil and abroad.
The ultimate goal of Tupigrafia is to unwrap remarkable typography, calligraphy and lettering artworks as raw material for graphic designers. Tupigrafia informs Brazilian readers about the international type scene, and also shows the world what’s going on in Brazil. For these reasons, since the beginning, Tupigrafia has been working as a catalyst in Brazil, attracting type designers, graphic designers and art directors and also spreading awareness of typography and calligraphy among graphic artists.
Our friend and Brazilian typeface designer Rafael Dietzsch comments: ‘As you can imagine, twenty years ago, in Brazil, there were very few publications on typography available in Portuguese, and Tupigrafia made an effort to fill this gap. For me, as a beginner, it was very helpful, a nice introduction. It’s almost fun, colourful and easy, instead of boring, academic and massive. I think these are rather good qualities, as they are trying to achieve a broader audience, since it’s difficult to get Brazilians engaged with reading, especially on such a specialised subject. And I can say that many good designers in this country had their first contact with type and typography by reading this magazine. Lastly, although Claudio and Tony are great designers, I think both of them have a highly artistic profile, that is reflected in the magazine.’
Here is our interview with Claudio Rocha, born 1957, co-founder, co-editor and co-publisher of Tupigrafia. While we doff our caps to the great variety of content the São Paulo-based magazine has published so far, we’ve added more photos at the end, including one of its creators taken in 2000.
What does ‘Tupigrafia’ mean?
It’s a word pun. In an informal way, Brazilians are used to refer to themselves as ‘Tupis’, from ‘Tupi Guarani’, our most numerous indigenous tribe. So, generically speaking, ‘Tupigrafia’ means ‘Brazilian typography’. And that’s it.
Why did you start publishing Tupigrafia?
We love letterforms and we want to have fun. Tupigrafia is our eternal excuse to be in close contact with letters.
What are the main features of Tupigrafia’s visual identity?
First of all it’s a magazine with the shape of a book; the page size (22.5 x 15.5 cm) and the use of sewn binding and cover with flaps, makes it look like a book. Moreover, for one of the covers of Tupigrafia 9 we made a humorous visual commentary, showing a reproduction of a classic book binding, taken from a library, with marbled paper and leather corners and so on. On this specific cover there is no masthead or any textual information, allowing people to happily call it a book, if they wish. Usually the magazine is printed offset (including digital printing) with some sections and the cover in letterpress. As we have paper companies sponsoring the magazine the paper also changes from one issue to another. The choice of paper is driven both by our intention to use paper as a design element and by availability from the sponsors.
For the first five issues our covers were related to the main article and we asked our contributors not only to provide ideas and texts, but we also invited them to design their articles. Tupigrafia is a very unpredictable publication and from issue 6 onwards, we chose to free ourselves from these constraints. At that point we went on to design and print more than one cover for the same issue.
In fact both Tony and I always want to design the cover. Technically, in the print run, it’s possible to place two or more cover designs. So, we could satisfy ourselves and also some of our talented graphic designer friends, who were begging to collaborate with their own design ideas. And we happily discovered that some readers were pleased to have all the covers in their magazine collection too… No complaints at all!
There are no restrictions to the use of typography in our pages, no constraints at all in designing covers and articles. Type is set according to the contents of each article and, in the same way, the page layouts change to suit contents. For instance, in the article about Dwiggins’s work (Tupigrafia 8), the titles and texts were set with his typefaces; an article on Portuguese type design (Tupigrafia 9), was set with Portuguese typefaces, and so on, as a symbiosis between form and content. Even the mastheads change from one cover to another…
Eventually we got round to designing our own lettering and also typefaces specifically for our articles. Samba typeface, for instance, was created by Tony to set the titles of the Tupigrafia 4 article on J. Carlos, a Brazilian illustrator and graphic designer active in the first half of the 20th century who created amazing Art Deco lettering.
— How do you manage contributors and contents?
We have a list of possible articles from which we make a selection. We try to balance the themes for each issue, in a range that covers history of typography, type designer profiles, visual essays, typeface reviews and font technology. On the other hand, we publish articles loosely related to typography or graphic design but with a strong potential for visualising, such as visual poetry, street art and even the crop circles phenomenon.
— How do you deal with the distribution and other business aspects?
Tupigrafia was not conceived as a commercial product. It’s a sort of mission, but mostly, we take it as a playground. We don’t have a business plan. Schedules are often easily forgotten. We handle distribution ourselves, and in recent years, we’ve added crowdfunding both as a promotion and selling tool. Eventually, after years of hesitation, we set up our online store tupigrafia.com, where past issues can be snapped up whenever printed copies are still available. For those which are sold out, we are uploading the PDF versions. In the near future, we’re hoping all the editions will be available in PDF format.
Besides the support of our readers and collectors, we count on the support and kindness of educational institutions, type foundries, museums, print shops, art material suppliers and paper companies, which provide the practical resources, such as opening their doors to launching events and/or buying advertising pages. It’s vital to keep the project alive and kicking. We are profoundly grateful to all of them. Also, as publishers and researchers, we are invited to give lectures in educational institutions and cultural centres in Brazil and abroad. We’ve been promoting the magazine around the world, and Brazilian typography too. Among much else, we’ve been to the St. Bride Printing Library, the Politecnico di Milano, Typo Berlin, TypeCon and ATypI.
— What about Tupigrafia and the history of Brazilian typography?
In Brazil, letterpress printing was forbidden by the Portuguese colonial authority until as late as 1808, making Brazil the last country in the Americas to have it. And that’s why we have no tradition in producing types. Despite this, we’re always delighted to talk about Brazilian stories. In Tupigrafia 11 we published an article about a Brazilian punchcutter, João Mosz, who used to work at Funtimod, the biggest 20th century Brazilian type foundry, operating from 1932–1997. He told us amazing stories about his career. Also, in Tupigrafia 12 we published two pieces on Funtimod: the first article, based on a dissertation written by Isabella Aragão, offers a close look at Funtimod’s history and its type collection which includes matrix sets imported from Germany and reflects modern typography of the early 20th century.
The second article features pages printed letterpress with original Funtimod movable types from the collection of OTSP. Indeed OTSP is not only the publisher of Tupigrafia, it is mainly the space dedicated to the activities of teaching and design experimentation that I founded in 2000 with Marcos Mello. The letterpress inserts featured in Tupigrafia 12 were designed and produced during the Vintage Editing workshop we held in May-June 2019.
— The 12th issue of Tupigrafia was a great success, and sold out…
It was a milestone in our design and productive process, a turning point. On the one hand, we have cutting-edge resources in digital graphic technology such as flexography, variable data printing and the use of advanced printing equipment like the HP Indigo. On the other, handmade interventions in customised copies with silk screen, collage and calligraphic and stencil art. The papers provided by Fedrigoni Brasil also strongly contributed to the final look of the issue.
With Tupigrafia 12 we celebrated the relevance of printed matter in our digital era. I can say, without a doubt, this issue has no equivalent in contemporary publishing. As for the complexity of printing, more than 60% of the pages in letterpress averaged four colours on both sides of the sheets. It was such a big effort that we ended up printing only 800 copies, and half of them were acquired by the crowdfunding supporters. Some copies were distributed to the sponsors, collaborators and participants in the ‘Funtimod’ workshop. The remaining copies were acquired at launching events, resulting in a sold out edition — just after its publication!
— Tupigrafia 13 is your latest issue. Would you like to introduce its main contents?
Well, unlike the previous issue, which underwent long and laborious production processes, the thirteenth issue of Tupigrafia was entirely conceived and edited in just three months. Except for the silk-screened covers, it was printed only in offset. But care in research and design was the same as usual.
This issue features visual poetry, calligraphy, epigraphy (with images from the Museo Lapidario Maffeiano, Verona) and the wood type collection from Tipoteca Italiana. The main article covers the typefaces designed and produced for Olivetti typewriters, with excerpts from María Ramos’s dissertation on the subject (MA in typeface design, University of Reading, 2015).
— Can you tell us about the Brazilian scene today?
During the 20th century, a dose of creativity arose with tropical vibrance and restlessness in publishing and advertising. Nowadays, in the digital era, the situation has changed, partly thanks to the Brazilians that went to study and practise type design abroad. Across the last twenty years Tupigrafia helped to create a type culture in the country and to push the knowledge of typography to a higher level. The gap in the type culture in Brazil has now been filled by a young generation of type designers and calligraphers, eager to express themselves in the digital environment, but with real interests focused on manual techniques such as lettering and letterpress.
Somehow our magazine is a significant participator in this scenario with a dual role: eyewitness and player.
