Gabriel Diogo: Nike Posters for Corinthians

Gabriel Diogo, the São Paulo illustrator whose work celebrates the colours and routines of Brazilian backyards, has been commissioned by Nike to create posters that pay homage to his Corinthians-rooted childhood. For fans of music, streetwear and football culture alike, the commission signals how club identity and visual art keep shaping the look and soundtrack of the terraces and the city.

Diogo’s route wasn’t linear. He worked in the design industry from 2013, studied graphic and digital design at the Istituto Europeo di Design — graduating in 2017 — and in 2019 redirected his practice to illustration. That daily commitment produced a visual language that feels both personal and communal: warm, dry-brushed textures, vintage kit details and small, faceless characters that invite viewers to step into the scene.

“It was a dream come true,” he says.

His pieces treat football as more than a game. Terrace flags, sticker albums and the revered team shirt — the o manto sagrado — become cultural artifacts, loaded with family stories, rituals and neighbourhood pride. That’s why brands from Itaú to ASICS and projects such as Nacione Branding’s World Cup typeface UsMeCa have tapped Diogo: his work maps the social life around football as convincingly as it depicts a sunlit backyard.

Diogo’s personal series, Série Cotidiano, is a running love letter to everyday Brazil. Scenes of fathers taking kids to matches, friends sharing a beer, or someone strumming a guitar after a long day are all rendered in warm palettes that evoke concrete, heat and memory. The faceless figures are deliberate — an open invitation for viewers to see themselves in the image.

That authenticity matters. Diogo is candid about the obstacles he navigated — technical courses, a government loan to finish his degree and the challenge of sustaining creative work on the city’s outskirts — and his advice to aspiring artists is straightforward: keep learning, value your effort and hold on to the things that make your work yours.

For music fans, the crossover is clear: football shirts and posters live in the same visual ecosystem as gig flyers and band merch. Diogo’s Nike posters are another example of how club culture feeds fashion, sound and design — and how a local story can become part of a wider cultural rhythm.