Visual law: an emerging concept of the meeting between law and design

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the notions of legal design and visual law, verifying their possibility of application in Brazilian law. The research problem faced is: what are the concepts of legal design and visual law and is there room for its application in the Brazilian legal scenario? We start from the following hypothesis: legal design and visual law are not synonymous and both are in line with Brazilian law. The applied methodology was: the method of inductive approach, the method of monographic procedure and the technique of research of indirect documentation. The text is divided into three chapters: the first conceptualizing legal design and user experience; the second, conceptualizing visual law and differentiating it from legal design, as well as touching its structural elements; and the third part, evaluating the reasons for using visual law in Brazil, as well as indicating cases of its application. Finally, the results, in general, are that the expressions are not synonymous. The legal design consists of the meeting between Law, Design and Technology, applying Design techniques over legal practice, aiming to improve the user experience. Visual law, on the other hand, refers to the application of visual elements in the layout of documents, in order to better organize them and make them more aesthetically pleasing, in an attempt to improve the performance of the document, reading time, comprehension content and reader engagement. There is room for the application of visual law in Brazil, there are already examples of this, however, there remain challenges of a cultural and technical order to be overcome.