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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.
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.
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.
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.
Greenpeace CONNECT cover
I've redesigned the Greenpeace supporters magazine Connect. I'm pleased with it, and so are the Fundraisers at Greenpeace which is nice/essential. Here's a snap of the cover, look out for a longer and more detailed post which follows soon.
Valuable Mapping
Earlier this year Greenpeace International commissioned me to help them communicate what's happening to the Indonesian rainforests. The project has resulted in the creation of 'Protection Money', a 76 page printed report packed with maps and infographics which you can download. I'll post some photos of the actual printed report here soon but for now here are a few of the infographics.
Another output of the project was to put a map of Indonesia, which illustrates the 'values' in the land, (that's carbon stored in trees and peat, and animals). The map you can see here is a Flash generated prototype, created with the aid the stunning Avenza Mapublisher plug-in for Illustrator. There may well be a more interactive and dynamic version available in the new year but for now, go have a play and see how rich and diverse Indonesia is, and just how much of a conflict there is between the evil logging companies and the values
A big bit of new type
I'm redesigning the Greenpeace UK members magazine Connect. Bespoke distressed Gothic 13 Std type will feature heavily in the new design, strong and hand-made, it nails what Greenpeace means to it's supporters.
Orangutan Breaks
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.
