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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
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.
Designed Well I Think
WIT is a new Helsinki based Finnish-to-English language service. They specialise in translation with cultural understanding and are looking to work with Finnish cultural organisations and businesses.
Designed ideas and wordsThe brand I've designed for them puts what they do up front, using and creating with language. This clever word play and elegant, sharply coloured type is intended to position WIT as being a human, approachable company - a genuine alternative to online, faceless translation services which don't try to understand the meaning of the words they're working with.
The slogans are formed of three words, starting with the letters 'W', 'I' and 'T'. The first set of three postcards is direct - We Improve Text, the second suggestive - Want Impressive Text?, and third authentic and a little funny - We Include "The". The latter is a translation related gag, Finnish speakers have issues with the English use of 'The', often mistakenly leaving out of translations.
The typesetting is distinctive, combining script and bold gothic letterforms to convey that WIT understands creativity. The logo and strapline are simple and deliberately plain. The colour palette is Blue - the most Finnish colour, Brown - natural and warm, and and Orange/Red - red being the traditional colour of editing mark-up.
What next for WIT?Their business and post-cards shown here are their first move to marketing their business and I'm currently helping them with their site and blog designs.
Orangutan Breaks
Well baked branding
The Cake Sale
Here's a taster of a brand we're making for The Cake Sale, a recent start-up which is going to sell great cakes, cookies, muffins and brownies in the workplace. 25% of their profits will be going to the brilliant Kids Company.
Interested in having great cakes for a good cause in your office? go to The Cake Sale's homepage.
A User Centred Identity
Flow Interactive's brand identity
User Centred Design consultants Flow Interactive asked me and my mate Russell to design a them fresh identity. They wanted a logo which showed them to be as innovative and creative as their media clients. It had to look a bit cool, not tight jeans cool, but enough to dispell ideas of usability experts being dull.
The script logo was borne of both their name and the amount of drawing Flow staff do. Devised to appear hand-drawn yet planned, warm and professional, it was to be used in any one of six colours based from Post-it note colours.
Designing Positive Change
The Greenpeace UK Brand Identity and Communications Strategy
I visited the London offices of Greenpeace a few days ago and saw that the Brand Identity I created for them a few years ago is still very much in use. This blog wouldn't be complete without a post on this project so here is the story of that project. The project came out of a request to design a new set of stationery for Greenpeace UK. So I asked what seemed a natural question, "what am I to base my designs on?" The answer was interesting, there were no design guidelines. I proposed a project to resolve this lack of guidance and the Greenpeace UK Publications team agreed. The project was to deliver; a new Communication Strategy, Brand Statements (kind of pointed mission statements) to express organisational and campaign goals, guidance on Logo usage, a Colour Palette and some Typographic rules. All this was to be brought together in a Style Guide.
A Communication Strategy
The new brand had to be borne of a shared vision of who Greenpeace’s audiences actually were. We recognised that the key constituencies of Greenpeace are; The Powerful; politicians and industry leaders Supporters; the people who give time money and expertise to Greenpeace Allies; organisations, groups and individuals with whom Greenpeace share goals. I helped Greenpeace to establish an easy-to-relate Positioning statement to guide us through the project and to frame their future communications, it is: Intervene > Engage > Transform. Thereafter every single campaign action and piece of communication was to speak to at least one of those three descriptors. The new Communication Strategy grew from being part of the brand project into it’s own fully fledged piece of work, becoming a guide to the strategy which sat alongside the brand identity guidance.
Brand Statements
Publishing organisational mission statements is normally a cue to induce sleep but for Greenpeace it was apparent that by being an environmental protagonist they should make their motivations clear at all times.
Using the Logo
The Colour Palette
For Greenpeace colour is synonymous with The Rainbow which adorns their ships which traverse the planet so we wanted to create a palette which was varied. To form the Primary palette we took the colours used on the logo - green, black and white - and added blue and orange. The former representing water, the latter to be worn by activists involved in direct actions as well as to be used as accent colour online. Secondary and Tertiary palettes were created to work in concert with the core colours. The former, bright signifying mainly specific campaigns, andthe latter mainly pale colours and greys provided as a backdrop for the primary and colours. Greenpeace green, orange and light grey are used to great effect on the Greenpeace UK website.
Typography
As with the colour, the variety of type Greenpeace were using prior to this project was varied and inconsistent, my audit revealed some 11 fonts used on just 20 documents. Type selection had to be rationalised and so we selected a few and set down some principles. We decided to steer clear of the trend for having just one font for all media thinking it to be too conventional for such an unconventional organisation and inadequate for it's needs - we agreed that reports would look awful in Georgia, Times New Roman (yuk) or Arial. Foundry Sterling was selected to be the primary font of the brand. A sans font with requisite elan and a full family of styles and weights made it useful for everything from printed banners right through to reports. Helvetica was selected to be used on-screen as it’s the system font visually closest to Sterling. We recognised the need for using other fonts from time-to-time and so we set out guidance which allowed for that, so long as there was a compelling reason to break with style. The 'UK's worst fish retailer' campaign shows this well.
Style Guide
The style guide brought together the guidance, principles and rules developed during the project in one simple to use ring-bound document. This document is widely used within Greenpeace in the UK and beyond.
The Identity in use
Aside from the stationery which in part led to this project starting, Greenpeace often launches new campaigns which require new branded communications; briefings and reports, leaflets, banners, flags, stickers, t-shirts - I could fill the web with examples but above are just a select few of my designs which use the Brand Identity. If your organisation, campaign or business is thinking about it's branding I'd be happy to discuss your needs with you. Call Paul on +44 (0)20 8299 6523 or email me.
