Project 2 - Climate change

The brief for this project was as follows:

To design a set of visual communications on climate action that explores the use of layout, colour and concepts

To prepare for this project I monitored my own usage of energy for one day which highlighted all the things I use that contribute towards global warming. Despite finding things like mobile phones and laptops among other electrical items to be the most prevalent contributors to climate change I made on a daily basis, I found them very difficult to incorporate into my ideas. I was anticipating getting started on this task because it was a brief that may resemble the ones I would have to do in the future

One concept I came up with to target a younger audience was to use a smart phone in the advert due to the high likelihood that they would own one. It was hard to convey the idea that helping with climate change was as easy as tapping a button on our smart phone, so I ultimately ended up scrapping this idea. 

I went through several concepts before settling with my final idea. These included a polar bear sitting on a diminishing iceberg with the silhouette of a city under the waterline and putting the 'cool' into recycling by drawing sunglasses on everyday pieces of litter. 

I finally settled on taking the image of a thermometer to indicate rising global temperatures. The poster below was an initial final image that I created digitally by using my graphics tablet and SAI Paint tool to complete the drawing which was finished off on Photoshop. I used the gradient to indicate the danger associated with higher temperatures with the red at the top; a colour that is usually associated with danger of some sort. In hindsight I should have made the red more striking in shade as it alleviates some of the urgency of the poster when completed in the faded pink.  

I was pleased with the idea to position the text along the right of the thermometer to resemble the lines used to measure temperature, however when I spoke to Soofiya she suggested using a different font for the lettering. I experimented with this below.  

The original font was too simple. I thought that it resembled that used by Apple to promote its products too much, making this look like an advert rather than campaign poster. Although I don't have the biggest selection of fonts on my computer at home, it is the subtle things that make the biggest difference.

The font variation used below seemed slightly too rounded and childish to use in my campaign. It resembles the infamous Comic Sans too much for my liking and instantly sends out the message that this poster applies to children, to an extreme even looking like a child's health poster at a brief glance. 

The aesthetics of this more traditional font were too dated to use in a modern campaign poster for climate change. Despite this font still being widely used in the industry, it is mainly to promote a product as luxurious or relate it back to an established heritage which I thought was unable to relate the the message I was conveying. 

The font in the image below was simple enough, but even small elements can make one feature unsuitable for a certain purpose. This font in particular resembled the old one on my HTC phone and (for me personally) gave connotations of something more dated and replaceable which is why I chose not to use it in the end.

The text used in the image below is different from the ones used before due to it's capitalisation which could offer a well needed sense of urgency. The outlined aesthetic of the font is a little too much for this poster and diverts the attention of the viewer away from the main illustration of the thermometer. The spacing between the letters was also too large and meant that the text had to be condensed and altered. Despite this being able to be changed in a program such as InDesign, I had no idea how to use the program at this stage.

Final image

Microsoft Yi Baiti was the final font chosen before my work was submitted. I feel that it emulates a simplicity that means the viewer focuses on the illustration whilst looking contemporary - not too heavy.