Primary source
The law is confirmed in the published text, not in the news about it.
The brand
Nobody moves countries alone.
MigraSpace is a newspaper and a network for people who move countries. The image that signs everything we do is a woodcut: four people walking the same way, eyes on the horizon, with a sun rising over the city that awaits them.
Why this image
The ones who walk
For a long time immigration was told as the story of a hero: the man who leaves, crosses the sea, reaches a strange land and prevails. It is a beautiful story and it is false. People who move countries rarely go alone. They go with their mother, their child, the woman in the headscarf, the younger brother; and when they do go alone, they arrive somewhere others have already cleared the way.
Our mark has no single face. It has four. A woman with curly hair at the back, two women in headscarves — one of them almost a girl —, a young man with curly hair in front: different generations, origins and beliefs, all looking the same way. They are not fleeing: they are arriving. The body leans forward, the chin is up, the eyes are open. It is the posture of someone who has decided.
Above them a red sun rises over the outline of a city. It is the first morning in the new country: the day you go to the public office, sign the contract, take the child to school. The newspaper exists for that day — and for every one after it.
We arrived together. What comes next, we also do together.
The sentence that sums up the house
The aesthetic
Woodcut, not illustration
The image is made like a woodcut: shapes gouged out of a block, with no outline, no halftone, no gradient. What is black is ink; what is white is the wood left standing. Red comes in a second pass, in one place only. It is the oldest and cheapest way to print an image — the one of pamphlets, chapbooks and posters pasted up at night — and that makes it the right technique for a newspaper for people who arrive with nothing.
It comes from a precise lineage, and the first reference is from home: MigraSpace is made by Brazilians, and the popular woodcuts of the Brazilian north-east — those of cordel chapbooks, of J. Borges and the masters of Juazeiro and Caruaru — illustrated thousands of stories of people who left for the big city with that same economy of means. Then come the German Expressionists, who went back to wood to say what polished painting no longer could; Mexican social printmaking, which set crowds in profile walking across its posters; and the Portuguese posters of April 1974, with their single red on raw paper. In all of them the people appear as a group, in profile, in motion. Our drawing knows where it comes from — and whose it is.
It is also a practical choice. A woodcut survives anything: printed in one colour on a photocopy, sharp in a 16-pixel icon, inverted on black in the night edition, stamped on a card or painted on a wall. No gloss, no shadow, no fashion. Twenty years from now it is the same image.
LineageCordel
The woodcuts of Brazilian cordel chapbooks: flat figures, solid ink, stories of those who left for the big city. Our root.
LineageExpressionism
Wood cut by force, angular faces, emotion before proportion. Die Brücke, Kollwitz, the Berlin printmakers.
LineageSocial poster
Mexico's Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Portuguese posters of 1974: the collective in profile, two colours, walking.
The icon
How to read the drawing
- Four profiles, one directionA woman with curly hair, two women in headscarves, a young man. Different ages and origins looking the same way. No one rules over anyone: it is a group, not a hierarchy.
- The red sunThe only patch of colour. It rises behind the city: it is the morning of the first day, not the sunset of someone leaving. The same red marks, in the paper, what changes and what has a deadline.
- The cut-out cityA skyline of towers and roofs, unnamed. It could be Lisbon, Madrid, Berlin. It is the place that waits — and is not yet known.
- The diagonalsShoulders, arms, the road below: everything runs left to right, upwards. The direction of reading and the direction of the road.
- Ink and woodOnly black, white and one red. No outline, no shadow, no gradient. The drawing bleeds to the edge — the figures leave the frame, like people who keep walking — and is never distorted, recoloured or boxed in a frame.
The colours
Paper, ink and a single red
Paper
#F3EFE7The background of everything. It recalls the printed newspaper and the notebook where people jot down deadlines and addresses.
Ink
#121115The type, the rules, the shadows. It is the colour of confirmed information.
Red
#FF3B1FUsed sparingly: the deadline that ends, the law that changes, the button that matters. If everything were red, nothing would be.
The type
Three voices
AaHeadlinesArchivo Condensed
Narrow and heavy, to say a lot in little space — like on a front page.
AaReadingNewsreader
The serif for long texts and standfirsts. Made for unhurried reading.
01ServiceJetBrains Mono
Dates, times, job codes and numbers. Everything that must be read without room for doubt.
The newspaper
Why a newspaper
People who move countries make serious decisions with little information: whether to file an application, accept a contract, wait or go ahead. A rumour in a group chat can cost months. That is why the house takes the form of a newspaper — with sections, bylines, sources and public corrections.
Every article is reviewed by people before it goes out, confirmed against the official source and signed by its author. When we get it wrong, we correct it in the open. And we write for the reader: what changes, for whom, from when, and what to do next.
Next to the newspaper is the network. The four people in our mark arrive because, before them, others cleared the way and stayed to show it. On MigraSpace that means the communities, the mentors and the people who have made the same journey.
Service first
What changes, for whom, from when and what to do.
Everything signed
Every article has an author and every author has their record on view.
Errors corrected
Corrections are public and stay on record.
Welcome. Walk with us.
Whatever city lies behind the sun, you do not have to walk there alone.