Wallpaper magazine planned to release a special edition about each of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Their intention was to work with collaborators from these countries, so given that a third of Julia is Brazilian they contacted us to design a typeface for the Born in Brazil issue.

Creating a typeface that represents your home country proved to be rather challenging. National characteristics can be both inspiring and commonplace, so avoiding clichés became as important to the project as being truthful to the cultural landscape of the country. As the project developed, it was clear for us that we were more interested in this typeface capturing and embodying a mood than representing any definition of Brazil.

The result is an uppercase family made of parallel strokes going from thick to thin. They're there to hint gestures, breaking the flatness and suggesting a flow to the lines that form the characters. Due to the complexity of the design, the family has two different versions: one with four strokes for larger body and another with only three for smaller sizes.

When finishing the typeface we couldn't help noticing a resemblance between the parallel strokes of the typeface and Oscar Niemeyer's design for the façade of Edifício Copan, an enormous building in São Paulo that waves through the city center. We named our typeface after it, in an acknowledgement of this happy coincidence.