How to provide information about all the Brazilian geographic indications in one place?
At the moment we started this project, Brazil had almost 60 Geographic Indications regularly registered. Geographic Indications are supposed to bring value for a local production of a certain product or service, as it testifies that only a single location can deliver such qualities. On the other hand, the publicity of the Brazilian Geographic Indications, towards the general audience, was restricted to a few printed books. In a partnership with the Brazilian organizations that oversee this subject (IBGE and INPI), we developed the Official Page of Brazilian Geographic Indications. My job was on the design and front-end development. In this case, my objective was to represent the Brazilian countryside traditional feeling in a modern language.
The main challenge was to permit users to find all the Geographic Indications at a glance. Even though the map with all the location marks is an appealing instrument, it works more as a piece of communication about the coverage of the page, than it would do as a menu. The reason is simple. First, users should know precisely the location of the Geographic Indication under interest, and secondly, they are supposed to activate the zoom function many times till they can find their target. The most evident solution was to include a search field. We did, so a user can type the name of a Geographic Indication and find it. But it would only comprehend one part of the navigational behaviors. Users can also wander towards something they don’t know yet. That’s why we listed all the Geographic Indications in a lower stage of the scrolling.
Going further, each of the geographic indications brings many aspects of the respective production. It was organized in tabs. We understand that it can comprehend large amounts of data in a single page, as well as the, also present, picture galleries. At this point, users can also interact with the maps. They can zoom precisely the limits of the GIs, checking whether their properties are included.
