From Almada to Broadway: Bráulio’s Beautiful Chaos
From punk zines in Almada to Mac Miller’s posthumous masterpiece, the Portuguese designer turned chaos into a design manifesto — and the Grammys are finally paying attention.
In a world where everything looks the same, Bráulio never did.
He grew up in Almada, drawing on walls and dreaming in noise. Not the polished, minimal noise of design schools, but the raw kind: feedback loops, graffiti tags, zines photocopied until they bled. The kind of noise that refuses to be tamed.
Fast forward to New York, where the immigrant kid from the south bank built a cult following turning chaos into visual rhythm. His posters don’t whisper; they scream, dance, convulse. His album covers look like they were made in the middle of a meltdown, and that’s precisely the point.
“I like things that feel alive,” he once said in an interview. “Perfect design is dead design.”
This week, the art world finally caught up. Bráulio has just been nominated for a Grammy — for the artwork of Balloonerism, the posthumous Mac Miller record designed in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Alim Smith. The deluxe vinyl looks like a hallucinatory toy box: reflective foils, pop-up folds, and chaotic symmetry that mirrors Miller’s dreamy, fractured world. It’s tactile, un-streamable, defiantly analog.
For anyone who’s been following his path, this feels like a long-overdue recognition. He’s designed for Frank Ocean, André 3000, Róisín Murphy, and countless indie bands that orbit the messy intersection of music and art. He’s done illustrations for The New York Times and WIRED, then turned around to print bootleg t-shirts or design wine labels and socks. Nothing is sacred. Everything is fair game.
His philosophy? Break your own rules before someone else turns them into a brand.
It’s a punk ethos disguised as design. A Portuguese accent filtered through Brooklyn grit. A reminder that rebellion can be beautiful — if you know how to hold a marker like a weapon.
At a time when AI threatens to sanitize visual culture, Bráulio’s work feels almost utopian in its imperfection. You can see the brush strokes, the scanning errors, the human error in every layer. It’s visual jazz — offbeat, improvised, and impossible to automate.
He often jokes that he left Portugal because “no one wanted weird stuff.” Ironically, it’s precisely that weirdness that made him a cult figure abroad. From Almada’s damp walls to New York’s endless billboards, Bráulio didn’t just design his way into the industry — he infected it with energy.
Now, as he stands on the Grammy stage next February, it’s less a triumph of career than of attitude: that chaos has a place in design, that art can be both dirty and divine, and that somewhere between the Tejo and Broadway, a new kind of order was born.
