Elaine Ramos grew up without any knowledge of design—and perhaps even more surprisingly, she grew up in a house largely devoid of books. Moreover, Ramos’ homeland of Brazil didn’t offer public higher education in the commercial arts while she was in school, and, not knowing that graphic design even existed, she wound up studying architecture at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo.

She hated the timelines inherent in the world of architecture; it took years to design a building, and still more to see it constructed, if it ever even made it to that stage. “I became much more interested in restraining my design to smaller objects, so that I could hold them, so that I could control every detail—or have the illusion of control,” she says.

In 1997, she worked on her first book cover in partnership with her school’s imprint. After she graduated, she got a job on the architecture book line at Cosac Naify, the Brazilian publisher known for its lavishly designed art and academic titles. It was here, Ramos says, that her lifelong “love affair” with books began. Her architecture training wasn’t a total waste, though. “It made me think more structurally,” she says. “My focus is not only at the surface, but at the materials, the functioning, the industrial processes.”

Only after ensuring that she has laid the foundation of a solid interior concept on which to bring a book’s best ideas to life—via design, paper selection, careful consideration of the overall tactile experience—will she move on to the cover, which she regards as a total synthesis of everything within. Ramos considers her decade-plus career at Cosac Naify as a rich, experimental lab in her development, and when the house closed in 2015, she carried the lessons she absorbed over to the new publishing venture she co-founded, Ubu.

What follows is a selection of work spanning Ramos’ career, showcasing her desire to approach each manuscript on its own terms, allowing content to wholly dictate visual concept.

The poetry of French writer and mathematician Jacques Roubaud is rife with wordplay and experimental language, and Ramos sought to play off of that in the book’s design—which she did by bringing Fefe Talavera, then known for her street art, on board as an illustrator. Talavera constructed a series of typographic animals for the book using Letraset characters, and the creatures went on to adorn and interact with Roubaud’s writing.

Ramos then designed a custom alphabet from dozens of different fonts to bring the text of the poems to life. The result is literal wordplay that’s whimsical, yet retains its legibility. After carrying her custom typeface and one of Talavera’s animals over to the cover, Ramos set the composition in a radiant orange to bolster the shared sense of humor between text and design.

Working on academic titles can often mean low print runs, and thus low budgets. That was the case for this set of eight books on anthropological theory. With a series analyzing such a wide range of places, cultures and subjects, Ramos sought to unify everything through simple geometric patterns that echo the art of numerous societies at once—be they patterns found in basketry, pottery or even body art and beyond.

“The design is simply based on the intersection of two diagonal grids,” she explains. “The range of variations resulting of this simple starting point is what makes it fun.” And affordable, too.

For Herman Melville’s (other) classic work, Bartleby, the Scrivener, “The idea was making an edition with a very tight connection between form and content,” Ramos says. So Cosac Naify decided to pull out all the stops.

The book’s title character works in an office on Wall Street, and apathetically fields requests from his superiors with his trademark phrase, “I prefer not to,” dwindling down the amount of work that he does day by day as he stares out the window at a wall. In her design, Ramos sought to create a book that refused to be read: Upon holding a copy of Bartleby, the reader discovers it has been stitched shut. Once the thread has been pulled and the book opened, the reader comes face to face with Bartleby’s signature wall—and realizes that she must then use the supplied bookmark to slice the folded pages open one by one, chiseling away at the enigmatic title character bit by bit.

As for the cover design, while some might have expected Ramos to go over-the-top to outdo the volume’s elaborate production methods, she tightly adhered to her concept, and crafted it to look like a document that might have been found on Bartleby’s desk during the time of the story. A simple and elegant solution for the master of refusal.