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The Redesign of Greenpeace Connect
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.
