Camilo Sebastián Rojas-Lavado was a talented and visionary designer, illustrator, and visual artist whose artistic career spanned decades and continents. A graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, he studied with Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, and Thomas Roma. Camilo received a scholarship to study typography with the legendary typographer Wolfgang Weingart at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, where he cultivated a unique aesthetic that fused technical precision with deep cultural resonance.
Camilo developed a singular approach to graphic design, integrating precise language with a social commitment to equality. A thoughtful and perceptive thinker, he approached every graphic commission with utmost seriousness, regardless of its scale, and carried out a philosophical study on how to convey the message clearly to a broad audience without sacrificing visual quality. For him, a commission was never just a job; it was a profound and dynamic study of the need to communicate and educate, and of the meaningful impact on the intended audience.
Beyond his professional work as a designer, Camilo was a prolific visual artist. He shared his vision through numerous solo and group exhibitions, presenting large‑format drawings and paintings. His career began at the age of five, when his work was included in the Second National Printmaking Salon of Maracaibo, Venezuela. A culminating achievement of his artistic legacy is the inclusion of his limited‑edition art book, Estudio de Rootamental, in the prestigious collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1976, and moved to New York with his parents in 1982. Today, Camilo Sebastián is in a forest, in direct contact with the roots of the trees, where he continues his long daily conversations and asks them why they interrupt the flight of the parrots.
We are in the process of creating a foundation that will preserve his work and help new generations embrace graphic design as a form of social change. Funds are currently being raised.
Please consider making a donation: https://gofund.me/b8cdebbc9