The Challenge

Two of Brazil's leading social-impact foundations, Fundação Tide Setubal and Rede Nossa São Paulo, set 50 concrete goals for São Paulo to become a more equitable city by 2030, aligned with the UN's 2030 Agenda. A civic initiative like this lives or dies on whether people engage with it, and it had to speak at once to policymakers, activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens. The identity had to be credible enough for City Hall and accessible enough for the street.

My Process

I built the identity from a simplified map of São Paulo. Each region carries a grid of squares sized to its level of public investment, denser where the city invests and sparser where it doesn't, so the visual system pictures the very inequality the initiative is fighting: the gaps in the grid are the gaps in the funding. From that core idea I extended an illustration and identity system that could carry a complex, multi-stakeholder, data-heavy agenda across formats and audiences while staying coherent and human.

Key Decisions

Let the data build the identity. The core visual came straight from the city's own inequality map, each region's grid scaled to its public investment, so the brand made the argument just by existing, before a single word was read.

Credible, not corporate. The work needed institutional weight without institutional coldness: warm enough to invite participation, solid enough to be taken seriously by decision-makers, and built to hold up whether it appeared in a policy deck, a press piece, or an activist's hands.

Results

A civic identity that carried a high-stakes, multi-stakeholder advocacy agenda into the public conversation, trusted by two of Brazil's most respected social-impact foundations to represent a decade-long commitment to the city.

What Made This Different

This is the kind of work that convinced me design is a civic tool, not just a commercial one, a direct line to what I do now in govtech: making complex, public-interest missions legible and worth engaging with.