Customer Day — Marília Shopping 2019 — Editorial Illustration

Elevating the category standard locally.

Brazilian regional retail has a predictable visual standard — retouched photography, gradients, promotional typography, a generic saturated palette. It is predictable because it works: it communicates an offer and drives sales. But the visual aspiration ceiling is low, and the public ends up consuming an aesthetic standard far below what they see in magazines, global brands, or even on their own social networks.

What if a Customer Day campaign in Marília looked like a New Yorker cover?

The goal was not a distant, inaccessible reference, but to show that the city deserves the same aesthetic care as a metropolis. The choice of Malika Favre's language was specific and technical, not merely an aesthetic whim:

No shortcuts, no automatic rendering, no stock.

In 2019, before the popularization of generative AI tools, faithfully replicating an editorial language of this complexity was entirely manual work in Illustrator. Every angle, every color surface, every negative space relationship was built as a deliberate decision. The campaign generated three central pieces:

Deconstructing, translating, and executing with fidelity remains a scarce resource.

In an art direction portfolio, this project serves a specific function: it shows the decision to elevate the visual standard in a regional retail context, executed with solid technique and a declared high-level reference.

In a market where local retail tends to be predictable and AI tools have democratized average-quality visual execution, knowing how to deconstruct a complex editorial language, translate it to another context, and execute it by hand is the skill demonstrated here.