ENEM 2023

delivered: ready-to-print materials
client: INEP
date: May 2023
about: Illustrations produced for the ENEM 2023 (National High School Examination).

The ENEM, National High School Examination, is a test applied by INEP (a federal institution dedicated to research and education) to evaluate candidates that want to enroll in a Brazilian university. I was hired to produce the illustrations that would be used in the manuals and activity notebooks for the training of the exam application team.
The exam is applied annually, and each edition adopts a different theme. The theme for the 2023 edition was the body of work of the artist Heitor dos Prazeres. His works portray the identity of the Brazilian population that lived in the slums, featuring black, mulatto, and brown characters celebrating Carnaval, working in factories and in the fields, or in everyday situations. His art falls into the naïf category — works that naively portray the artist's reality, without much technical whimsy or a deeper meaning. I was instructed to use the works of Heitor dos Prazeres as a reference for creating the characters used throughout the training materials. The challenge was translating the artist's artwork (generally made using the oil on canvas technique) through digital illustration. As my client had requested that the illustrations should be inspired by the work of Heitor dos Prazeres, but should not be a mere copy of his creations and that the style, texture, colors, etc. should be simplified, I chose to work with vector illustration (using the software Illustrator) instead of raster illustration. This choice is advantageous because it allows scaling the illustrations indefinitely, greater control over the stroke, and the possibility of changing the color palette more easily.

Paintings of Heitor dos Prazeres:

The coordinator's manual presents the following:

■ detailed instructions about the coordinator's attributions;

■ illustrations and infographics explaining procedures, objects used in the application of the exam, etc.;

■ some activities, such as a board game that intends to explain the procedures in a playfull way, timeframe of events, case studies, etc.

The cover of the manual features a courtyard of a typical school in the interior of Brazil. A group of ENEM applicators dances the samba together with the participants. I tried to bring the illustration as close to Heitor dos Prazeres' style as possible but keeping some characteristics that made it clear that the characters are inserted in current times, not in the 1940s (as they are characterized in the artist's works): for example the applicators and participants wear jeans, the school in the background has characteristics that refer to contemporary buildings, etc.

To maintain the key characteristics of the Heitor dos Prazeres' paintings, the characters eventually are represented holding typical instruments of a "roda de samba" (samba gathering), like the small guitar, the tambourine, etc. Obviously, the style of the characters and the color palette is also very similar to the one used in the artist's paintings.

Some illustrations were incredibly challenging to produce: this infographic shows the prohibited objects that must be kept in a transparent plastic envelope to avoid cheating on the exam. Some things didn't exist in the times of Heitor dos Prazeres (smartphones, iPods, tablets, etc.), so I had to try to translate their style to the style of Heitor dos Prazeres' paintings.

Some activities were inserted in the coordinator's manual to make learning tasks, processes, assignments, etc. easier and more joyful. One of these activities was the board game "ENEM & Ação" (ENEM and Action), which emulates and borrows the characteristics and elements of the famous Clue Master board game. 

The ENEM & Ação game contains a board game in which a typical Brazilian school is depicted, with the classrooms, courtyard, bathrooms, principal's office, etc.; the cards of objects and forms to fill; and the cards of applicants and participants.