Colégio Andrews is a private school in Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1918 by educators Isabel Andrews and Alice Flexa Ribeiro as one of the first mixed-gender, secular schools in the city [1]. The school’s visual identity is closely tied to Brazilian modernist design, with its symbol originally created by Alexandre Wollner, a pioneer of graphic design in Brazil and a founding partner of the Forminform studio [2].
Design and History
The Colégio Andrews symbol was originally designed by Alexandre Wollner in 1958 [3]. Wollner had returned to Brazil that same year after studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, and co-founded Forminform with Geraldo de Barros, Walter Macedo and Ruben Martins [2]. The FAU-USP library collection also holds a 1958 project entry for Colégio Andrews attributed to Ruben Martins, Wollner’s Forminform partner, suggesting the mark emerged from the studio’s early work [4].
Decades later, the design team that would form the Brazilian studio Ouro sobre Azul was commissioned to refresh and implement the original symbol. According to the studio, the request was to update the mark while preserving its essence, aiming to convey the school’s constant pedagogical progress and the permanence of its teaching quality. The redesign increased the thickness of the structural strokes to give the symbol greater legibility across the many varied applications used by the school [5].
Meaning and Symbolism
The Ouro sobre Azul project reserved blue and red for most institutional applications, while allowing great freedom in the use of colors for items such as student notebooks and the school uniform. The studio noted that the simplicity of the symbol, combined with the cheerful variety of color combinations, always blue paired with another color, gave the impression that the uniform was less an imposition and more an expression of the students’ values and aspirations [5].
Typography and Design
Wollner’s graphic solutions were based on the primacy of the grid, structural rigor and a totalizing project approach, principles he developed during his time at the Ulm School and applied throughout his career [2]. The Colégio Andrews mark reflects this rationalist, geometric approach characteristic of Brazilian modernist design of the late 1950s.
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