Dataviz in Perspective: teaching and professional practice of data visualization in Brazilian Design by Café.art.br

"Dataviz in Perspective: teaching and professional practice of data visualization in Brazilian Design" is the first-ever original publication entirely dedicated to data visualization, from the perspective of design, completely "made in Brazil" - from content to form!

Data visualization, like all other manifestations of design, is plural and diverse. Since Latin American voices are underrepresented in dataviz events, awards, and publications, a book that compiles articles on dataviz by Brazilian professionals is in itself a substantial contribution to changing this scenario.

The design team's mission was to take this up a notch.

Since the dataviz field has almost no Brazilian and/or Portuguese language bibliography, we explored the "made in Brazil" concept to highlight the importance of the country's dataviz production and to guide us on the book’s design.

The book's visual concept had to work on two fronts: the book's graphic design and the data visualization we wanted to create exclusively for this project. Looking at the bigger picture, Brazil is an extraordinarily diverse and multicolored country. Our team studied artists that showed this diversity in their work - Tarsila do Amaral, Rubens Valentim, and Abdias Nascimento - and also national symbols, like the country's flags. However, considering current events, the Brazilian colors and flag gained specific meaning during dark times in national politics, especially in 2022 when the book was being designed. Under this complex and controversial context, we concluded that a national flag is a symbol that should connect and create identity and belonging for all people in a country, not divisiveness and hostility. It cannot be associated with a single, extreme, political view. This drove our research and discussions during the design process.

Ultimately, as an effort to reclaim our flag and colors, we chose the Brazilian country and state flags as the starting point for the design.

Guided by the question: “How many ‘Brazils’ can we represent?”, we took apart and classified all the flags’ shapes and colors and created a unique visual dictionary. This allowed us to draft hundreds of composite flags, exploring the shapes and colors while searching for variables that would be encoded into each visual element of the visualization.

Each flag element encodes information about the chapters and authors - character count and number of images present in the chapter, and the Brazilian region where the author is from, their area of work, and years of experience with dataviz. As a result, a flag dataviz with endless possible combinations.

The flags are present in the chapter openings, giving the reader context about the chapters and authors. There is a chapter dedicated to explaining the flags’ meanings as well as the dataviz design process.

Finally, to achieve a book that's “100% Brazilian”, the typefaces used were all designed by Brazilian professionals.

Like the country itself, the book's design is full of vibrant colors and bold shapes but also brings complex information about dataviz that is "made in Brazil".