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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.
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.
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
