This project involved the creative direction, cover artwork, and bespoke lettering for Be The Good People, the first full-length release by The Mighty Tiny for ÅND&. Letterforms were built from torn paper scraps, assembled and scanned to retain texture and material noise. This added a unique and personal touch to the visuals and emulated the essence of the music.

Design by Studio8585
Creative Direction by Mario Depicolzuane
Lettering and illustration by Varshini KVSS

In this project, students compose posters via analog, collaborative methods. For each composition, a series of random prompts are issued. E.g., Students explore verbs like weave, tear, and layer. I foster an improvisational approach by periodically requiring the students to swap compositions and work collaboratively. Time limits are set and each collage is executed in 20 minutes or less. Secondary type is added digitally. PLEASE REFER TO MY EMAIL AS IT CONTAINS A DETAILED EXPLANATION.

An interactive web-based typographic tool that creates liquid bubble distortion effects on text using WebGL shaders and p5.js. This tool allows you to create dynamic, water-like text effects with customizable animated bubbles that displace and refract the typography.

Street Glyphs is a collection of letters drawn in urban spaces using a self-made tool that creates spatial slit scans with a phone. Combining sensor data with a live camera feed makes it possible to paint with video in 3D by moving the phone through space. Recorded samples are then loaded into a special workstation, where the glyphs can be composed and customized. Drawing inspiration from the rebellious spirit of graffiti, each glyph represents the environment in which it was created.

Poster – Created by AI
The poster visualizes the phrase “Created by AI”, with each letter composed of digital glyphs: icons and markers from design software representing fills, outlines, and empty states.
The composition reflects on automation and digital authorship, where human presence is minimal.
It explores the interplay between code, interface, and visual form, questioning the boundaries between machine-generated perfection and residual human influence.

Pixi Mono is a variable & responsive font designed with a custom drawing web-based tool — a letter consists in a 5×9 grid that can be stretched to any width / height ratio.

This variable font Stories challenges the manner in which type styles should function. With the dynamic nature of the web and digital tools available, it questions why digital type should still be limited by the rules of the mechanical typeset. Type was designed considering moment of transition as an inherent part of the typeface. With a move of a toggle the letters transform from contemporary and structured form into a dynamic and rule bending shape.

Poster – Human Touch
The poster examines human presence and imperfection through type drawn with a glue gun.
Its raw, tactile texture emphasizes the physical act of making and the tension between control and spontaneity.
The composition centers on unrefined human gestures, showing type as both medium and expression, embodying presence, vulnerability, and the delicate boundary between approachability and distance.

Poster for experimental music concert at Quintavant/Audio Rebel, Rio de Janeiro.

X_3 depicts a distorted X-ray of human knees, grotesquely bent beyond natural form. The work reflects human self-denial: questioning myths can fragment mind, body, and spirit. The bent X-ray embodies the toll of consistent negation. Typographic form and human vulnerability intersect, visualizing denial as both concept and condition.

This typeface functions like a minimalistic modular light system built from dots and glowing segments. Letters are formed through signals rather than outlines, creating a rhythmic, almost kinetic presence. It reads as technology in motion — less about text, more about attention, pulse, and state.

“Volume(s): the Essence of Form” examines sculptural language through typography and image-making, inspired by Constantin Brâncuși. The project layers photograms, prints, and frames to explore how images can become sculptural. Typographic explorations use an ovoid as each letter’s “counter” (a motif from Brâncuși’s work), sculpting around it while preserving anatomical integrity (as much as possible). It is a question of volume, form, and the intersection of visual disciplines.

X_2 is reimagined as a scissor, highlighting its bold, characterful form. By nature, the scissor divides, mirrored in the letter’s pixellated design, referencing the digital world. The work reflects social media’s fragmenting effect, separating communities under false sparkle. The X merges letter, tool, and concept, visualizing division in a digital age.

These experimental posters are part of a larger collection of my work titled “Tuned In With Type”. This is a project that explores the expressive typography in the world of music, in particular mirroring the melody, themes, tone of voice and lyrics of a few songs that all differ between each other in those characteristics. I particular, here you can see posters for “Dreamer” by Lucifer and “Antagonist” by Nova Twins. The type was modelled in air-dry clay for texture, then digitally manipulated.

X_1 is a typographic study of the placeholder state in digital design software. This pale blue X represents absence and negation before meaning appears. Built on a strict perpendicular system, it asserts itself without illustration, embodying pride and autonomy. The work captures the tension between presence and absence, showing negation in its most reduced typographic form.

This series of drawings and paintings explores playful typographic form as spatial structure, investigating the intersection of art, design, and architecture. Inspired by architectural fragments, ruins, and sites, the works examine cross-sections, form and counterform, and scene complexity. The drawings allow narrative to emerge through form rather than words.

For the year 2025, I have created a calendar that shows a different optical illusion poster every month. Some of these experiments play with typography. In addition, you could tear the poster out of the calendar every month, resulting in a small poster collection at the end of the year.

To create this poster, Hester combines new and “dead” technologies. Each letterform is made in the darkroom using photo-sensitive paper and physical objects (glass, 3D prints, cellophane, and gelatins). The photogram process is very delicate and experimental. Small changes can produce radically different photogram prints.

The photograms are scanned, lightly edited in Photoshop to remove things like dust and fingerprints, and composed in InDesign.

Poster for the 60 years of Esdi – Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Rio de Janeiro.

Caltrop explores typography as a defensive form. Built natively in 3D modeling software, the typeface draws from natural and man-made defense mechanism—sea urchins, plant burrs, and caltrops—to produce letterforms that repel, snag, and resist. Across digital and physical contexts, the forms shift from animated and material-driven objects on screen to spatial elements that respond to their environment. The project includes a 3D-printed model measuring 8″H × 10″W × 4″D.

Rottura is a broken, dramatic typeface that instantly captures attention through its distinctive form and strong visual impact. Its sharp angles, abrupt lines, and unconventional contours create a sense of tension and movement, making the text feel vivid, expressive, and emotionally charged.

The Mindpuzzling typeface was created to capture the feeling of having thousands of thoughts at once, intertwining into one larger picture, like a puzzle coming together. Built on a grid, it is a monospace font designed for layering, overlapping words and sentences to create new shapes through their interaction.

This is a work in progress in which oil in a frying pan was photographed over a period of more than a year while cooking. This image material now serves as a graphic element to examine the extent to which everyday liquid forms can be used in typographic design.

To create this poster, Hester combines new and “dead” technologies. Each letterform is made in the darkroom using photo-sensitive paper and physical objects (vinyl, plexi, glass, and gelatins). The photogram process is very delicate and experimental. Small changes can produce radically different photogram prints.

The photograms are scanned, lightly edited in Photoshop to remove things like dust and fingerprints, and composed in InDesign.