Graphic Design in Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s

The 1950s were marked by development policies and increased urbanization and industrialization in Brazil and Argentina. During that period, design began to be regarded as a profession, and modernist ideas greatly influenced a professional field gradually occupied by practitioners with different kinds of training and different conceptions of graphic design. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the institutionalization of design education was shaped by the modernist influence of the International Typographic Style, also known as Swiss Style. In this context, the paper analyses the institutions that encouraged these processes, as well as the schools of thought that helped to consolidate a modernist conception of graphic design in Brazil and Argentina. More particularly, the paper examines how the modern ideology was interpreted in peripheral societies that at the time were semi-industrialized, drawing parallels between the design scene in two neighboring South American countries.