www.pedroburneiko.com
Art Director and Illustrator | São Paulo, Brazil
Tell us a little bit about your background?
I took the Advertisement course at a University in Bauru. At my first year I started to understand what it was and to have a giant will to work for a agency. One day I was watching a TV show at TV Cultura hosted by Soninha, and she invited some advertisers to explain how a agency works and one of them said how one could get an internship. At the same moment I reached a phone book searching from the agencies addresses. I started to call every agency introducing me and saying that I wanted to talk to them. I started working for the first agency I called. After 2 years I found that a childhood friend had an agency called Estúdio MOL in São Paulo, so I reached him and asked for an internship there during my summer vacation. He had a temporary position and invited me. When my vacation was almost finishing, I said that it could be a good thing to live in São Paulo and then he invited me to stay and I moved to São Paulo for good. In 2004 I was asked to work for Agência Click as Art Assistant and there I met some people who taught me a lot. After one year, I was promoted to Art Director and worked in very important jobs, such as Fiat sites and hot sites. After three months I was invited to join Gringo.nu, where I am now.

Your job and position at the moment?
Today I work for Gringo.nu as Senior Art Director. I’ve been working in projects for Classic Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero. The responsibility within each job is really much more than the Art Direction itself, that is, includes development of projects, take care of all steps, since some creative planning, creation, information architecture, art direction, design, team coordination, partners, production, to quality assessment.

Do you have any hobbies outside of digital art and computing?
Yes, I have a musical project named SUPERQUEM{}, based in Bauru (São Paulo countryside), we try to rehearse and play whenever is possible. For me, music and my band is very special, simply because it is one of the few moments of my adult life when I get to have full independence to do whatever I want. The band is fully instrumental, with two basses and various types of instruments placed as each song asks. The address is: www.myspace.com/superquem. I try also to think in random routines at home, to go out to take pictures and practice visual studies at home, as a way to relax. This is so important because a lot of solutions I need every day are born from these studies.

What would you tell for those who want to be designers?
They have to believe in themselves above all, to not give up to be happy with work. It is difficult, but not impossible. I suggest: everything we focus on, one day will be true. I could take years, but it will happen. It’s up only to you not anybody else. Always study, always learn and never stay in only one style.

Where do you look for inspiration?
For me, inspiration is everywhere: life, people, situations, places. Living is the greatest inspiration of all. Every day in the morning, before I start to work, I see a few benchmark sites on design, motion, illustration, typography, 3D (see more: http://delicious.com/burneickovisch). They are mandatory in order to know what’s going on in the world. We have to take advantage of the fact that today it’s pretty easy to get information on whatever you want through the internet and books. I also try to have a reasonable amount of books, magazines and images, from which I can search things easily. More important than seeing is doing.

Do you intend to stay living in Brazil?
For now yes. I’ve been learning more and more about my country and my conclusion is that Brazil is damn great. I try to analyze things out of São Paulo – because I was born in the countryside I have a different background, other kind of relationship with people, with the city and the Nature. Of course Brazil has a lot of problems, mainly with poverty, I think this is unfair, but there’s a question for all of us: If this is something no one agrees with, what can we do to change it? It’s easy to blame someone else for something we should’ve done, but what’s my share of guilt in that? What can I do to make it better and try to help in any way? I think of living some time abroad one day, I believe that this kind of experience is amazing; I want to study or take an interesting course abroad.

Which are your dreams for the future apart from work?
It’s to get more involved with music, since lately I didn’t get much time for it, with photography, read more, develop some politics projects I had planned and film a short-film.

Which work is your favorite?
My favorite is my newest job: it’s the HappyMe website for Coca-Cola. The challenge and learning were amazing; we didn’t have idea about the results we could get. It’s a website, but it was very difficult and complex. Only the people that followed the whole process knows how hard it was and how many hours we’ve worked to create it and produce it. This project is special for me because it took several steps to be good. We worked Carlo Giovanni’s studio, that helped with HappyMe illustration concept, and with the 3D producer Terra Cota, which made the illustrations into 3D and Flash, with the amazing team of programmers of Gringo, specially Gabriel Laet, who worked all the 3D part in Away 3D in Flash. To finish it, we had Arthur Joly to make the excellent audio and sound effects. The most difficult thing – and which was the greatest – was the result: it’s a fullscreen 3D website 3D, which runs in most computers in Brazil with fluency and a lot of interactivity.

Your favorite professionals?
Vicente Silva, Os Gêmeos, Sid Lee, Buck.tv, Lobo, Uniqlo´s websites, Robert Lindström and North Kingdom, James Widegren, Tomi and Cherry, logan.tv, Black List, rainbow monkey, crush.tv, oh yeah studio, nervo.tv, Julien Vallée, Cisma, Carlo Vega, Universal Everything, Headgear Animation, Stardust, Laika Studio, UnitedVisualArtists (UVA), Mat 0, life long friends hip society (LFS), Think Nau, Dvein, Alex Trochut, Doug Alves, Non-format, Vault49, Group 94.

What are your plans for the future?
My plans are very simple. I want to work even more with design for real, with pure Art Direction because it’s inside me, which is really my stuff, either illustration, websites, store windows, videos, t-shirts, snickers. I try to worry more and more: what I can do that’s really new? What makes sense for me? Where can I have new challenges and solutions? I want to discover me in several new ways, work in something that’s really useful. People are not a number machine. I believe we can make communication in a different way. Professionals are getting worried more and more about this, they are getting stuck in this (you have to get back to the mark, bla, bla, bla…) and thinking less about the humankind. I want to use design to work with the Third Sector, helping in any way, in order to change what needs to be changed.