How retro branding is bringing warmth and fun to São Paulo’s bars and restaurants

São Paulo is a city in constant flux. New bars, cafes, and restaurants open every day, partly driven by the aggressive densification brought on by the real estate boom reshaping many neighbourhoods. This creates fertile ground for designers, though working conditions are far from ideal: low-budget commissions, often among friends, and projects that are not always properly implemented. Bar identities, however, offer greater freedom. Less bound by the conventions of branding, they often seek to convey spontaneity and improvisation, leaving more room for experimentation.

For a long time, minimalist, “elegant” identities defined São Paulo’s visual landscape: clean, geometric lettering, patterns made from fragments of letterforms, dots, arcs, hatching, and so on. Designers would open their toolbox: simplify, geometrise, fragment and… voilà, a new identity. More recently, however, this pursuit of sophistication seems to have given way to playful, warm, colourful, illustrated identities that embrace handcraft and emotional appeal, extending well beyond the logo and storefront sign.

The identity created by Caxa in 2020 for Exquisito, a bar serving a syncretic menu drawn from across Latin America, was one that particularly caught my attention. At first glance, the approach is hardly surprising: it follows a path well worn by Latin-themed bars, but I always admire those who can tread familiar ground and still make it feel fresh.

The project grew out of research into Latin American vernacular culture, from cheaply printed street-food packaging and flexographic fruit boxes, with their simplified blocks of colour, overlaps, and misregistration, to the tradition of hand-painted signs and lettering. It also included a custom typeface inspired by vernacular lettering found in markets and small businesses, and a varied set of illustrations drawing on iconic and playful elements of Latin American culture.

For São Paulo’s bar scene, Arado designed the identity of Duas Irmãs brewery in 2022: a portrait of the two sisters framed by a central oval and hand-drawn lettering that embraces distortions and inconsistencies. The composition quite literally references early 20th-century commercial graphics, but the illustration’s stylisation recalls comic-book characters.

The bar features not only a hand-painted storefront sign but also the entire menu painted directly on the wall. The identity’s retro feel is reinforced by the commercial language of another era, for example, “Since 2022”, the owners’ names, and the classic Brazilian “agradecemos a preferência” (“thank you for your patronage”).

Flora de Carvalho’s identity for Suei, a bar and dance floor in the trendy Barra Funda neighbourhood, draws on a different history. Here, heavy, irregular outlines, anthropomorphism, disproportionate elements, brush-like typography, flat fills in slightly faded colours, and patchy blacks emulating Xerox prints echo the delightful naïveté of 1970s advertising.

The São Paulo-based designer and typographer drew on the idea of heat implicit in the bar’s name – Suei, Portuguese for “I sweated” – to develop a style she described to me as “melted”. Curiously, defying conventional branding rules, the project introduced three completely different ways of writing the bar’s name, sacrificing immediate recognition in favour of playfulness.

This retro wave is by no means confined to São Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, another project that caught my attention within this trend of nostalgic, illustrated identities was Biabum’s 2024 identity for Salva Bar. The restaurant serves food from Bahia, combining specialties from the sertão, sea, and mangroves. In the designers’ words, “the brand brings together bold colours, textures, and phrases that capture the essence of Bahia, while drawing on the chef’s emotional connection to his home state.”

Also working within the logic of the poster, the identity developed by PS2 for Bar Aperitivo, which has just opened in São Paulo, takes on a retro feel. This time, however, the reference comes from elsewhere: 1970s Italian summers and their colourful drinks. For a bar where DJs spin vinyl, the São Paulo design duo, now based in Hamburg, translated the record’s circular forms into simplified, geometric illustrations combining flat colours and gradients; in the wordmark, the O’s become olives.

Closer Look

Elaine shares local tips for where to spend your time and cash in São Paulo, including a design studio’s merch store, a type foundry and an art gallery, plus (aptly) where to find the best bars.

• Arado Studio has an online store selling products connected to its research on Brazilian rural imagery, including t-shirts, pins, notebooks, posters, and the now-famous calendar, which led to the studio designing Brazilian pop star Anitta’s latest album.

• Suei and Cervejaria Duas Irmãs are very close to each other, in an area packed with great bars. My favourite these days is Laska.

• Flora Carvalho is launching Familiar Faces, an independent type foundry that “sells retail fonts, engages in custom projects for brands, and sparks conversation”. There are still only a few typefaces available, but it’s well worth a look.

• Galeria Superfície, an art gallery representing artists whose work often takes a strongly graphic approach, has just opened a new space in the Vila Madalena neighbourhood, with a beautiful group exhibition on view until 17 October.