The Brazil-Germany Cooperation for Sustainable Development needed a digital home for its bioeconomy initiative in the Amazon, a program connecting producers, seed guardians, researchers, and institutional partners across a genuinely international audience. The site had to work for a Brazilian smallholder and a German policy reader with equal clarity.
The core constraint wasn't visual, it was linguistic. The platform needed to serve five languages, Portuguese, English, French, German, and Arabic, without any of them feeling like an afterthought. Arabic in particular meant designing for right-to-left reading from the layout up, not retrofitting it after the fact.
I authored the core English content myself and coordinated the translation approval workflow with stakeholders across languages and time zones. In Figma, I built the component system with language variants built in from the start, so RTL wasn't a special case bolted onto an LTR design, it was one of five equally-supported reading directions. I implemented the localized variants directly in WordPress, testing each language's typography and spacing independently rather than assuming what worked in Portuguese would translate visually to Arabic.
The platform now serves as GIZ's public-facing hub for the bioeconomy program, with content, testimonials, and publications navigable natively in all five languages. It remains one of the clearest proofs I have of designing for genuinely international, multi-directional audiences rather than translating a single-language design after the fact.
Tools: Figma, WordPress, RTL layout implementation, translation coordination
