Designing The Ramin Paper Trail
March 1st 2012 saw Greenpeace International relaunch the The Asia Pulp and Paper under investigation website which included part two of the campaign The Ramin Paper Trail. OneAnother undertook the art direction and design of the site and it's content.
The site has been devised to present campaign evidence in as public a manner as possible, reaching both the traditional audience for reports as well as Greenpeace suppporters and the public - feeding into Greenpeace's aim of promoting democracy and environmental issues by running transparent campaigns. The site exists in both English and Bahasa and was built on Greenpeace International's CMS.
The Ramin Paper Trail campaign is a presentation of evidence of deforestation of Ramin habitat. Ramin is a species of tree that grows in the rainforests of Sumatra, it is protected by international and Indonesian law and is illegal to cut down or export. Greenpeace found many Ramin logs in the log yards of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), Indonesia's largest paper company and a global player in the paper industry.
The investigation focuses on the Indah Kiat pulp mill, where APP pulps vast quantities of rainforest wood to make tissue, packaging board, copy paper and books for brands including Walmart, Xerox and Danone.
Satan, your mill is here.
Beneath the mill icon in the logo clean and crisp Alternate Gothic No.2 was used for the campaign's overbrand and the battered looking Dharma Gothic regular for the Ramin Trail campaign branding. The type is framed by an outline of smashed logs, made by fusing two Greenpeace photos taken in Sumatra.
Ramin is orange.
The orange stands out bold and bright in the identity, contrasting with the black and white of the identity and on the maps and trafficking route diagrams. This kind of orange also suggests danger in a way similar to red but which was kept for denoting APP as it's their brand colour.
Trafficking rainforest to a store near you.
A core objective of The Ramin Paper Trail is to show how Ramin enters APP's supply chain at the Indah Kiat pulp mill and how the tainted pulp made there ends up in branded products around the world.
A set of diagramatical maps shows the four trafficking routes out of Indah Kiat as clear flow diagrams laid over geographical maps. These hybrids work to give a sense of place without attempting to identify the specific locations of APP's 12 assoctaed mills and printers in Indonesia and China.
Having explained what the routes are, a futher set of diagrams were created, one spider map to show which brands recieve APP products, a graph illustrating that 83% of APP's output originates from Indah Kiat, and then a set of 16 graphs detailing how APP's exports it's output to 16 of it's major national markets. These Country graphs are best seen in their interactive form on the site.
It's all about paper.
The use of paper and card led to a range of graphic approaches. Photos of paper products were labelled and dropped into diagrams and the logo itself to re-affirm what APP makes with rainforest timber. Card and paper were cut into the shapes of people, trees and speech bubbles and used as illustrations. The Indah Kiat sitemap was laid onto old paper to make it look like a found document. Web-page headers were designed using photos, maps and pieces of paper and dossier to suggest that somewhere there's a real dossier with the site's content in it.
Backed with reality.
Darkened and desaturated photographs from Greenpeace's photo library serve as support to the content of the site, framing it with images which in turn contrast with and interact with, inviting viewers to switch between taking in both the detail and bigger picture of the campaign. The use of these background images also came out of a desire to use images large, as one would find in a printed report, and also to differentiate this campaign's pages from the rest of the Greenpeace site.
To see all the designs shown above working together go to The Ramin Paper Trail. If you're in Indonesia you'll automatically be directed to the Bahasa version of the site. Please do feel free to comment on our design work, and to get in touch with OneAnother if you'd like to discuss this work.
Greenpeace's Ramin Paper Trail
The site presents evidence and data gathered during a year long investigation into the practices of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), Indonesia's largest paper company and a global player in the paper industry.
The investigation presented on the site is centred on the Indah Kiat pulp mill which is where APP pulps vast quantities of rainforest wood to make tissue, packaging board, copy paper and books for brands including Walmart, Xerox and Danone.
I designed the campaign identity placing a satanic looking Indah Kiat mill at the centre of the logo. Vivid orange is used throughout to identify the presence of Ramin and robust condensed type sits inside the black silhouhettes of smashed logs. Elements of the site's layout and many of the graphics are made of paper and card, building the material subject of the investigation into it's visualisation.
Darkened and desaturated photographs from Greenpeace's photo library depict aspects of the investigation and of APP's badness, sitting behind the content of the site, framing it. In doing so I was seeking to invite the viewer to experience both the detail of the investigation's information and it's wider context.
For the full experience (and to save me describing something which is essentially visual) go to the site.
The Dogfather is back
Hamster as metaphor
A great short for nef by Leo Murray. That hamster really is impossible.
Poetic, melancholic and insightful.
Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip
A animated film by Leo Murray of Plane Stupid, explaining the science of climate change and what you can do about it.
Fizz on metalic peacock
I'm assuming designer had been watching Miami Vice videos and wound up thinking that yellow script with *hand-drawn* stripes and a drop shadow on metalic peacock blue was a good idea. It may have been just that in Florida circa 1986 but 25 years later in a south London housing estate car park it comes across as a bit shit.
- Posted from Camberwell, United Kingdom
We let the dogs out
The haute dogs served at the market by Cooper at The Dogfather Diner on North Cross Road in East Dulwich are a brilliant re-invention of the traditional hot dog - great beef dogs on fresh buns topped with "own recipe sauces in innovative original combinations".
My designs are rooted in familiar visual territory for a diner, strong monochromatic graphics and a retro type combinination are at this brand's heart. But these diner graphics are a little twisted, a 21st century reworking of 1950's americana. The crest holding the diner's name is gently decorated with aztec pyramids and rolling pointed wave shapes, cultural nods to the diner's central american and Indian influenced dog recipes - promoting the idea that this is multi-cultural hot dog dining.
The simple truth of the The Dogfather Diner is that the food is obsessive, Cooper's customers often become fans - which is where the idea for the smiling 1950's lady originated. Sporting haute dog sunglasses because, like many others, she loves The Dogfather Diner's dogs a bit too much. So much in fact that she's fashioned them into sunglasses. This may seem odd to you, it does to me too, but that's the kind of behaviour one can find perfectly normal having tasted the dogs.
If you'd like to find out what's cooking this weekend, want to know more about the diner or need to contact Cooper go have a look at The Dogfather Diner's blog.
Woof Woof Energy
The WWF Energy Report is a hefty, intelligent and beautifully designed look at the future of energy, how it can be generated and delivered sustainibly. The editorial design, photography are great, the world view redefinging maps are a thing to behold, visually challenging. I am a little bit green with envy. Hats off, good work.
