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.
Amazed at industrial logging
A preliminary sketch for an animated film I'm working on. The potty mouthed aspect may not make it into the final film.
A campaign in 2 minutes
I designed this animation for Greenpeace's forests campaign against Sinar Mas and APP and their destruction of the Indonsian rainforests.
Boring. The new interesting
Either a deeply ironic comment on the state of counter-cultures and/or the alternative music scene in the UK. Or just a simple statement of fact. As this was a builder's van I'm guess the latter is true but how I'd like it to be the former.
- Posted from London, United Kingdom
Graphic Design can change your life
Erik Spekermann gives away his design knowledge in this great little interview. Insightful, opinionated and downright helpful. His thought on generating fresh designs is inspired.
Hold tight to the Daily Drop Cap
These drop caps are from one of Jessica Hische's blog the Daily Drop Cap. The Brooklyn based illustrator/designer posts a new ornate, quirky, illustrative or plain weird drop cap every day. She also gives away the code so you can embed each drop cap into your own site which is rather kind. She does lots of great work for all kinds of clients, here's her site and portfolio packed with typographic treats.
Creating Greenpeace's Protection Money report
Protection Money is a Greenpeace report which exposes potential abuses to the UN's REDD program, the system by which developing countries are to be supported to lessen C02 emissions from deforesation whilst building sustainable industries. The report is available for download here.
Throughout 2010 I worked worked closely with Greenpeace's Forests Campaign, creating this report and it's contents which transformed a complex and potentially baffling issue into a cogent and reader-friendly experience. I was commissioned to supply a host of creative services vital to the report, including;
- Map Authoring - showing where the carbon, peat, forests and animal habitats are in relation to forestry concession
- Diagram Designs - explaining how bureaucratic sleight's-of-hand were being used to misrepresent plans to the UN
- Layout Design - from defining the narrative of the report to laying out the content on pages
- Supporting an international campaign- a localised version of the report for release in Indonesia.
Map Authoring
Prior to creating this report, the process for authoring maps for Greenpeace was known to be imperfect. GIS mapping programs used by mappers produce immaculate data but the maps they visualise can be ugly to the point of being illegible. To resolve this I set myself the task of learning Avenza's MaPublisher which meant I could import mapping data into Illustrator whilst retaining the data.
The mapping data in this report had to be perfect for two reasons. Greenpeace's intention was to use maps as a tool for calculating the volumes of carbon and the precise physical size of the areas of peatland and forest currently at risk of deforestation. The second motivation was to improve the quality of the maps, to make them authoritative by showing the mapping information in a precise manner whilst removing the visual clutter of previous maps.
We created and used two maps in the report. The first shows the Development Zones in Indonesia, huge tracts of forest and peatland which have been designated by the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry as viable for conversion to plantation. Alongside the Zones map is a diagram which makes sense of the map, showing how the thee different zone types make up the total area 'available' for deforesation. This is over-laid with the Indonesian government's own understanding of how land is already used. Taking this data and map together conveys that there is no area actually left for new plantations to expand into - without destroying more forest.
The second map is the more complex Values within Development Zones which locates endangered animal habitats as well as peatland, forest and the carbon stored therein. Soon after the publication of this report I created the interactive online version of the same map. This allows the user to choose their view of Indonesia by selecting to see values, forestry zones and plantation concessions. By overlaying these one finds where tensions exist between nature and the plans of people.
Diagram designs
At the heart of this report was the need to show the quantity of volume stored which was being put at risk by the Indonesian Pulp and Palm Oil industries. These industries had been promoting the myth that more carbon could be stored in their new plantations than would be stored in forests and peat. To arrive at this convenient conclusion their numbers ignored the carbon stored in peat and so lessened the carbon store at risk by 90%.
In response to this I designed the Fig.9 Forest and Peatland carbon graph. The horizontal axis shows all the combinations of peat depths and forest types and how they combine, meaning that the volume of carbon stored varies greatly area-to-area.The vertical axis shows the carbon stored above and below ground and how that will degrade and emit over time. The colour palette of this diagram uses the same colours used in Indonesia Value Map to help readers relate deep, unseen carbon stores to physical locations.
To make the process of deforestation feel less abstract I created the six part series Fig.10 the process of peatland degredation to show what happens to the land from the arrival of the diggers starting the deforestation through to the 4m deep peatland collapsing as it emits from beneath a plantation.
Fig.12 plantations mask the true extent of deforestation shows the systematic nature of deforesation in Indonesia. Clearing naturally forested areas and converting those into commercially productive plantations can give the impression that one kind of forest can simply be replaced with another without harm.
The final two diagrams shown above, pages 38 and 39 of the report, explode the concept that plantations are simply another, new kind of forest. Taking pulp plantations as an example on page 38, I combined a series of photographs to illustrate the production cycle of pulp plantations. This page sat side-by-side with graphs on p39, the first of which shows the model the pulp industry was basing it's carbon storage projections on. A projection which asserted that plantations would store carbon even after they had been turned into paper products. The second graph shows the reality of plantation carbon storage.
Layout design
Here's a set of spreads from the report. The horizontal page orientation emulates a presentation format, allowing for single pages to easily separated from the whole report for use in presentations. Each page is built on a 12 column, 9 row grid. This was necessary to elegantly accommodate the varied content of the report from text heavy pages through to pages showing huge photos, maps and graphics. The two different kinds of content, narrative and data, are signified with the use of white pages for the former and yellow pages for the latter. The gridded pattern of the pages lends the whole publication a sense of being rooted in data, true to the research based nature of the content.
Supporting an International campaign
Protection Money was designed in the first instance in English but it was created to be easily recreated in Bahasa (the language spoken in Indonesia). As Bahasa is roughly 10% longer than English, the page layouts, typography and grid were all devised to work perfectly for both languages with only a little tweaking of the layout and with just one round of proof-reading in Indonesia.
The report was digitally printed and launched simultaneously in Jakarta and London. It is available as a pdf from Greenpeace's website.
The impacts of Protection Money
Protection Money has unpicked many of the myths which the palm oil and pulp industries of Indonesia were promoting.
Protection Money has shown the Indonesian government how their well-intentioned policies were being manipulated for profit.
Protection Money is helping the Indonesian government to develop policies which will further Indonesia's economic development without destroying the fragile and unique ecosystems of their country.
If you'd like to discuss this work or your creative needs please contact Paul.
