Graphic Designer

My passion for graphic design began in my late teens when I co-founded MCI Serviços Gráficos, a small business focused on printed materials. This hands-on experience refined my skills and deepened my understanding of the industry.

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Timeline

Welcome to a retrospective of my graphic design journey, spanning three decades of creative exploration and professional growth. This curated timeline showcases a selection of projects, one from each year, highlighting my passion for innovation and dedication to excellence.

From my early days at MCI Serviços Gráficos in 1994 to my current roles as Art Director at Urbe Planejamento and Up Leads, each piece represents a milestone in my career, demonstrating my diverse contributions to the field of design.

1994
The Dawn of
the Digital Age
OPEN PROJECT ▲
1995
Consolidation and
Offset Technique
OPEN PROJECT ▲
1996
Design as
Contextual Strategy
OPEN PROJECT ▲
1999
Global Design on the
Waves of Hawaii
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2000
Design for the
American Specialist Press
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2002
Design and Marketing
in Service of the City
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2004
The Golden Age of
Macromedia Flash
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2005
Motion Design and the
Bachelor's Degree
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2007
Design, Sound, and the
Avant-Garde in Barcelona
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2008
Audiovisual at the
World Capital of Clubbing
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2009
Real-Time Design for a
Nation-Scale Project
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2010
Graphic design of the delivery material for the requalification planning of the banks of the Subaé river, in Santo Amaro, Bahia.
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2011
Graphic design of the Bidding reports for Salvador’s metro and monorail system
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2012
Redesign of the software Maker 3 user interface
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2014
Design for the Book Tidinha - Uma História de Família
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2015
Creation of the visual identity and styling the user interface of the MedKey platform
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2018
Virtual Tours for stores, shopping malls and gyms published on Google Street View
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2020
Creation and development of the visual identity and social media management of the Ecohit Fitness Gym
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2022
Creation and production of Rakau Surfboard, sustainable boards made from wood
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2023
Implementation of the virtual store and gallery by artist Sergio Amorim
OPEN PROJECT ▲
2024
Development of the Technical Assistance Portal and online courses for the development of Bahia's Urban Policy
OPEN PROJECT ▲

Get in Touch

Interested in connecting and sharing ideas? Whether you have a question about graphic design or simply want to say hello, feel free to reach out!

© 2024 MARCELO ABREU

My passion for graphic design began in my late teens when I co-founded MCI Serviços Gráficos, a small business focused on printed materials. This hands-on experience refined my skills and deepened my understanding of the industry.

Eager to expand my knowledge, I transitioned from from self-teaching to formal education, studying Graphic Arts at Maui Community College in Hawaii. Later, while pursuing a degree in Social Communication with a focus on Marketing in Brazil, I worked as an Art Director and Urban Marketing Consultant at Urbe Planejamento Urbano, where I played a key role in important projects such as Master Plans for multiple cities, public tenders for metro and monorail systems, and creating the São Francisco River Transposition Monitoring Platform for the Federal Government.

Seeking broader perspectives, I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design in Australia and later studied Audiovisual Production in Europe. Currently, I am pursuing a master’s degree in emerging technologies, aiming to drive innovation in design and marketing.

Outside of work, I channel my creativity into hands-on projects. As an avid surfer, I give back to the sport by crafting sustainable wooden surfboards, which I showcase on my Instagram @rakausurfboards. My passion for woodworking extends beyond surfboard shaping, and I thrive on tackling diverse carpentry and CNC projects, always eager to take on new challenges.

I am a lifelong learner with a commitment to excellence, always eager to explore new technologies and techniques. This dedication enables me to offer my clients cutting-edge solutions that stand out in today’s competitive market.

Coca-Cola Skate Circuit (1994)

This poster for the 1994 Bahian Skate Circuit marks the starting point of my design journey. Created at a time when Brazil had no commercial internet access, making the entire process an exercise in pure experimentation and patience.

The Technology Challenge: Built with CorelDRAW 5 and Photoshop 3, this piece came to life in an era when most advertising materials were still produced by hand. Visual references were hard to come by, arriving almost exclusively through the rare imported magazines that made their way into our hands.

The use of vectors for the three-dimensional logo, along with the image treatment — rudimentary by today’s standards, but bold for its time — reflects the broader shift from analog to digital. With no online tutorials or stock image libraries, every texture and every effect was discovered through trial and error, pushing tools that would soon go on to define the industry standard for years to come.

Bahian Skate Circuit (1995)

Following the success of the 1994 poster, I was invited to take on the visual identity for every stage of the 1995 championship. The challenge was to create a cohesive look across the series while keeping the raw energy of the sport alive in each piece.

Still working with CorelDRAW and Photoshop, I pushed toward a high-contrast image treatment aimed at a “drawing over photograph” effect, a way of giving the skater photos an artistic, urban quality that spoke directly to the street aesthetic of the decade.

Unlike today’s digital workflows, the process involved a complex preparation pipeline for the print shop. Color separation for film output was a critical step.

Mastering that color engineering, at a time when instant visual feedback simply didn’t exist, was essential to delivering the quality the circuit demanded.

Telebrás Stock Trading (1996)

In 1996, stock trading was a deeply physical experience — Sunday newspaper classifieds were the primary reference point for most of the public. This flyer was designed for street distribution, but with a strategic edge: aesthetics.

The piece was deliberately designed to mimic the layout of a newspaper classified ad. By drawing on the visual language of ad columns and high-contrast type blocks, the design created an immediate psychological association. Readers recognized it as a “buy and sell” service before they had even read a word.

Low Budget, High Impact: Printed on newsprint, this work makes the case that good design doesn’t require premium materials. The challenge was to turn the technical constraints of black-and-white newsprint printing into an asset, ensuring the flyer carried the authority and familiarity needed to earn the trust of anyone who picked it up off the street.

Wipika Kitesurf: Mauricio Abreu Pro-Models (1999)

In 1999, during my time living in Hawaii, I had the opportunity to contribute to a project with worldwide reach. My brother, Mauricio Abreu, was one of the pioneers and leading figures in global kitesurfing. As a Wipika athlete, he had his own pro-model boards and I was brought in to develop the visual identity for the boards that would be sold around the world.

The process was a genuine creative partnership: Mauricio would bring the initial sketches and concepts, and I would take them through to finished artwork ready for industrial production. Working in Illustrator and Photoshop, I handled the detailed vectorization of his drawings, digital colorization, and background creation. The challenge was translating organic, hand-drawn art into the technical, hydrodynamic format of a surfboard, ensuring the visual impact held up under sunlight and water glare.

These boards, including the Inferno and the Apocalypse, were more than sporting equipment. They were canvases carrying a raw, urban aesthetic to beaches. It was an exercise in both technical precision and artistic sensitivity, bridging the culture of extreme sports with the digital design technology of the era.

Sky Hi USA (2000) 

Still living in Hawaii in 2000, I was brought on to create the launch campaign for Sky Hi USA, a personal venture by my brother, Mauricio Abreu. The ad ran in specialist kitesurfing magazines across the United States, marking another milestone in our creative partnership at a moment when the sport was exploding in popularity.

As the piece itself declared, “An extreme sport for the new millennium”, the visual concept was built around that sense of era-shift. I leaned into design elements that felt cutting-edge at the time: neon glow around the kite, a composition built around a photographic film roll, and tribal textures layered into the background, creating a tension between the ancient and the technological.

URBE Urban Planning (2002)

Back in Brazil in 2002, while in my second year of a Marketing degree, I took on the role of Art Director at URBE Urban Planning. This project represented a shift in scale: eight years of graphic design experience now applied to shaping and communicating documents that would define the future of nine municipalities across Bahia.

I was responsible for the visual identity and complete editorial production of nine Municipal Master Plans. The work demanded meticulous organization, integrating large volumes of data, developing technical maps, infographics, and original photographic records. The goal was to transform dense technical information into reports that were readable, visually compelling, and accessible to both public administrators and civil society.

Beyond the visual work, I also authored the Urban Marketing sections of each plan. I developed city branding strategies, creating identities and marks aimed at boosting tourism and driving local development, as seen in the project for Rio de Contas. It was the moment design and marketing converged to think of the city as a social, historical, and economic product.

Casa Amorim: Pilot Project (2002)

In 2002, digital design was at peak Flash. It was the era when agencies and artists were pushing interactivity to its limits  and I was brought in to develop the microsite for the Casa Amorim Pilot Project campaign, one of the most established names in construction materials in Bahia.

Unlike the static websites of the time, this microsite was built to be a fluid experience. Flash made it possible to create cinematic transitions, animated menus, and intuitive navigation that walked users through the project’s highlights. 

Building in Flash required a careful balance of design, animation, and programming through ActionScript. The challenge was delivering the rich, sophisticated aesthetic associated with major film and global brand microsites, adapted for a regional market. This project cemented my transition into interface design, where aesthetics had to move in lockstep with functionality and the loading constraints of the internet at the time.

“Kite Season” | Channel 10 Australia (2005)

In 2005, I entered a pivotal chapter of my career by moving to Australia to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design. This academic project, a 30-second commercial simulating a Channel 10 broadcast promo, was the perfect opportunity to merge my background in kitesurfing with the new frontier of digital animation.

The animation was built entirely in Flash, with ActionScript driving interactivity and flow. The technical bar was set high: every illustration and background was created in Illustrator and animated frame by frame, achieving a fluid, hand-crafted aesthetic that the automated tools of the time couldn’t reliably deliver.

To deliver a fully realized piece, I also explored sound design, composing the soundtrack in GarageBand using pre-recorded loops. The result was a one-man-band exercise where visual design, animation, and audio worked in concert to sell the energy of an extreme sports TV series. This project marks my definitive shift toward design that doesn’t just communicate, but moves and engages across time.

 

Munir Hossn Experimental Web (2007)

During my postgraduate studies in Audiovisual Production in Barcelona, I developed this experimental website for multi-instrumentalist musician Munir Hossn. The project was conceived at the height of the high-impact web era, when Flash allowed the interface itself to become an extension of the artist’s work.

The goal wasn’t simply to inform, but to translate Munir’s complex musicality into a visual experience. The fluid navigation and organic transitions were designed to mirror the rhythm and sophistication of his sound — creating an immersion where users could feel the brand before they had read a single word.

Being in Barcelona, one of the world’s great design capitals, had a direct influence on the project’s aesthetic. This website served as a laboratory for exploring how audiovisual design could break free from the static grids of conventional web design, turning the browser itself into a digital stage.

Pacha Barcelona (2008)

During my time in Barcelona, I worked as resident VJ at the iconic Pacha, running the visual projections night after night. It was a deep immersion into European nightlife culture. I wasn’t just operating the visuals each evening, but also creating design pieces and Motion Graphics videos for the club’s massive LED panels and projection screens.

Most of that archive, hundreds of artworks, videos, and photographic records, was lost when my luggage and a hard drive went missing on my return to Brazil. The “April Calendar 2008” poster and the promotional video are the precious few pieces that made it through, and they stand as examples of the vibrant visual style and technical precision demanded by a global brand like Pacha.

As a VJ, my work was about creating a symbiosis between music and image. Producing videos in After Effects for Pacha’s nights required dynamic thinking: the color palette, the rhythm of the edits, and the information hierarchy in the flyers all had to reflect the energy on the dance floor. These recovered pieces are small fragments of a year of intense creative output at the epicenter of Spain’s electronic music scene.

 

Real-Time Design for a Nation-Scale Project

São Francisco River Transposition (2009)

Returning to Brazil in 2009, I once again took on the role of Art Director at URBE Planning, this time leading one of the most nationally significant projects of the period: an interactive monitoring system for the São Francisco River Transposition works. We developed a platform installed on touchscreen kiosks strategically placed in the Minister of Integration’s office and in the anteroom of the Presidency of the Republic.

This was a complex software engineering and UI design undertaking. I built the system using Macromedia Flash with ActionScript integrated with XML files, allowing construction data to be updated remotely. The result was a dynamic control panel capable of monitoring the physical and financial progress of the country’s largest infrastructure project in real time.

This project marked my farewell to Flash, which from 2010 onward would gradually give way to HTML5. The system remained active and fully operational through the end of the presidential term in 2010, serving as a critical decision-making tool. It stands as a high point in the use of interactivity for public data transparency and governance in Brazil, pairing technical rigor with an interface that felt intuitive and forward-looking by the standards of its time.