From Brazil to Canada: how my way of seeing design started to shift

I’ve always been drawn to the feeling behind things.

Even before I understood design as a profession, I was already paying attention to how things made people react. Not just visually, but emotionally. The pause. The smile. The silence after something clicks.

That part of me never really changed. It just found a name later.

Design, for me, has never been only about form or aesthetics. It lives in context. In how people interpret what they see, based on everything they’ve experienced before.

Moving from Brazil to Canada made that even more visible.

I started noticing things I didn’t think about before:

• how quickly a message needs to be understood in different environments

• how the same amount of information can feel either clear or overwhelming depending on context

• how emotion shows up in spacing, rhythm, and silence, not just words

• how trust is built quietly, through consistency over time

And slowly, something shifted in how I work.

Nothing is really “right” or “wrong”. It’s just different references, different habits, different visual languages.

When I started working across these contexts, I stopped focusing only on what looked strong. I started paying more attention to how things behave.

How an idea lands here.

What feels intuitive for this audience.

What makes the experience feel natural instead of forced.

It became less about comparison and more about translation.

And that changed everything.

The most interesting part is that there are no fixed answers. Every project asks for a different reading, a different pace, a different sensitivity.

Working between markets taught me something simple, but very present in everything I do now:

Design is not just about creating something visually complete. It’s about creating something that can be felt, understood, and lived in its own context.

And context is always changing...

Mariane