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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Greenpeace International launched The Ramin Paper Trail website yesterday, March 1st 2011, and I'm very proud to say that I designed it.

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.

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A great short for nef by Leo Murray. That hamster really is impossible.

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He has a show on right now at the KK Outlet in Hoxton Square and has three billboards under the railway bridge where Old Street meets Shoreditch High Street.

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A animated film by Leo Murray of Plane Stupid, explaining the science of climate change and what you can do about it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A preliminary sketch for an animated film I'm working on. The potty mouthed aspect may not make it into the final film.

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I designed this animation for Greenpeace's forests campaign against Sinar Mas and APP and their destruction of the Indonsian rainforests.

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Lineto a brilliant font retailer.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 

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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

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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.

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This is the second week-to-view diary I Art Directed for publishers Elliot and Thompson during 2010. It's for LBC, a London radio station.

I took LBC's focus on talk and put it at the heart of the design. The photography and text which forms the month double page breaks is based on the opinions of LBC's broadcasters, getting them each to select and talk about the parts of London they like most through the year. Knowing how busy London residents are I added a little detail on the week view page, the invitation to the owner of the diary to note the one thing that they will do each week.  

The main typeface featured in the design is Elephant, simple and bold, similar to the type used in the LBC logo but with a little more character. It is set in capitals for the month titles and lowercase for the body copy. 

If you'd like to buy of one of these diaries you can get one here.

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My idea for the design focused on creating a book which felt effortlessly classical, to align with the Classic FM brand whilst creating a suitably old-world feeling diary. The combination of Baskerville 1757 and off-white paper pages means the diary feels like it belongs to an age gone by. This aesthetic was built upon with my idea to put a double page break at the start of each month, adorned with a musical note and faced with text which refers to the note opposite and to that time of year. 

If you'd like to get hold of one of these diaries you can buy it here.

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In the summer of 2010 I was commissioned by the Greenpeace UK Fundraising team to redesign their supporters magazine Connect. Connect is Greenpeace's thrice yearly magazine which goes to their 110,000 donation paying supporters. It's this NGO's pre-eminent channel of communication with their life-blood.

The key tenets of the Connect design brief were to;

• authentically represent Greenpeace by building on it's existing branding
• reduce the magazine's carbon footprint, the quantity of paper used by 10% and distribution costs
• to make Connect more user-friendly and in so doing make it a more effective fundraising tool.

To achieve these outcomes I devised ideas for the physical and visual redesign of Connect, as well as proposing improvements to the content and running order of the magazine. 

Authentic to Greenpeace

In 2003 I helped Greenpeace UK define their brand design, combining highly legible type with sharp colour and photography within a modernist design context - Greenpeace are most definitely a left-aligned organisation. For this magazine redesign I introduced the font Gothic13 to add some much needed typographic punch and with it created a masthead, headlines and subheads which stand-out, bold but warm, within the overall design. To give these a used feel the masthead and headlines are visually distressed - made to look like the type has been letterpress printed. Actually, these details are created from abstracted textures found within Greenpeace photos. 

The magazine's page layout is based on a 4 column, 10 row grid. This means the information on the page can be tightly arranged when there's a lot to say. It also allows for the creation of negative space and touches of spontaneity, the former helping the content to breathe and reader to enjoy the read, the latter peppering the design with photos and graphics which deviate from the grid - granting the design a bit of a hand-made feel.

Less really is more

By printing less paper one emits lass C02 so this design is physically smaller than it's predecessor, 148x210mm (A5) down from 200x200mm. There are more pages, 32 instead of 24, but still the design uses less paper, and there's more content too. This is achieved by combining the page grid with economically sized, kerned and leaded text.

Another good reason for this new size for the magazine is that it fits a pre-formed C5 envelope for posting rather than the irregular envelope of the previous magazine format. This reduction in size has resulted in a reduction of the mailing cost to Greenpeace and further reductions in the carbon footprint of the publication.

User-friendly fundraising

Greenpeace really loves its supporters, it also really needs them. Flowering that need with easy and elegant communication is a good way to build a really great relationship with donors. To this end the new Connect features a host of design and editorial ideas that were new to this publication, including;

• feature headlines on the cover
• contents listed and grouped into 'features' and 'regulars'
• consistent use of type to indicate differences in detail and tone of the text
• author attributed features which serve to humanise the organisation
• tabs and content titles on all right hand pages
• illustrations and info-graphics enlivening feature and regular content.

There are many more design and editorial facets, please do inspect my design yourself in the gallery above or in the magazine itself if you're a supporter.

Connect ends with the all-important donation form. This page was tricky to design, having to be perfectly practical whilst standing out from the often-plain donation forms one finds on NGO and charity fundraising materials. The solution to this was a necessarily simple design formula; combine the donation form with Greenpeace's stunning photography and putting the request for money and the reason for donating together on the same detachable page.

I hope you've enjoyed learning a bit about this revitalised Greenpeace publication. I'm very proud of our work with Greenpeace on Connect, and am looking forward to designing the Spring 2011 edition. If you've a project that would benefit from the creative help of OneAnother please do email Paul.

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