LAY—OUT no. 12

Bráulio Amado is a Portuguese designer and illustrator currently based in New York City. His visual work is a buzzing cacophony of searing color, scrawled letters, mushed up figures and insightful humor. His work is equally at home in the pages of The New York Times, flyposted on a wall under the BQE, or on seemingly endless numbers of record covers. His work pretty much destroys any lines between design, illustration and so-called "art." His use of color, layering and expressive conceptual gesture is a life raft on the sea of bland mediocrity that is the commercial art world.

For his LAY—OUT volume Novas Habitações Para a Periferia de Lisboa (New Buildings for the Lisbon Suburbs), Bráulio presents a set of jarring juxtapositions—a suite of technicolor explorations of shape and layering on white pages, interrupted by smaller, pink paper pages with monochromatic gilded drawings. These two interleaved books playfully separate, hide, reveal, and interact with one another, creating all new compositions as one moves through them.