Graphic designer Braulio Amado picks out his favourite posters of 2016 from his new book

Portuguese graphic designer Braulio Amado has just released a new book through Lisbon-based publisher Stolen Books that catalogues the enormous amount of posters he created in 2016. The books contains over 100 posters and the selection process was fairly straightforward for Braulio. “Except for two or three posters I couldn’t find the high res images for, all the work I did in 2016 ended up in the book,” he says. “I also took two posters out of it because they were really, really bad and I felt embarrassed. Besides that I just organised them in chronological order, which was interesting because you can definitely tell where my head was at during some weeks.”

With the chaos and vibrancy of Braulio’s work, the designer wanted to keep the design of the book minimal. “There’s so many different styles and ideas all over the posters that the book design was intentionally kept as simple as possible. It works almost as a visual diary of my year, so it didn’t make sense for me to add anything to it as I was designing the book a few months after in 2017.” Rather than unnecessary flourishes the posters are contained within canary yellow pages and the book has allowed some time for reflection for Braulio.

“I think I need to chill out a bit and stop wanting to do so much. It’s awesome that I was able to produce so much work, but I definitely burnt out at one point, mostly because I was doing this on the free time from my full-time job at Bloomberg Businessweek, and later at Wieden + Kennedy,” explains the designer.

Seeing a year’s worth of work in one entire hit has given Braulio a new perspective. “The idea behind [the posters] was to be as spontaneous as possible, which sometimes works, sometimes not that much,” he explains. “Also, I get easily tired of my own ‘style’, so working on this book made me even more exhausted of looking at the stuff I do and has forced me to try new stuff.”