OUGD505 - Studio Brief 02 - Further Ideas Development

In assessing my initial idea of producing a publication and research into the WWF's brand guidelines, it was decided that I should produce a campaign poster instead since the guidelines on producing publications for the organisation were quite extensive. This would also involve working with lots of information, which was thought could potentially not be as effective as a poster since people generally won't want to trawl through long paragraphs of information. For this reason, it was finally decided to produce a more impactful poster campaign which does not need as many words to get the desired message across.

For similar reasons, it was decided to focus on just one of the facts found during the initial research stage, one of the most shocking being that 'to print and produce one copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times requires 75,000 trees'. 

In visualising this fact in an impactful way, I began to think about what sort of things would be in a newspaper rather than using the obvious choice of a newspaper itself. One of these things was crosswords, something which is usually put in newspapers and magazines to get the reader to think about the answers. The first idea therefore was to use this idea of a crossword in a playful way to get the audience to think about what it means as they would typically with this sort of puzzle. Sketches based on this idea vary in layout from having the crossword situated on a piece of newsprint as it would typically to making the shape of the lines branch out like a tree would, representative of its links to deforestation and paper wastage (since paper comes from trees).

Another idea was to incorporate more use of photography and typography. Photographs would display images of newspapers lying around on the tube or people reading newspapers on the tube/ trains, where they can frequently be seen. These photographs would be overlayed with a bold use of type stating variations of the fact which I decided to focus on, for instance '75,000 trees. Is it worth it?' and 'One edition = 75,000 trees'. These would be accompanied with the WWF logo and a short statement on this fact as the bottom of the page to quickly further highlight the purpose and origin of this information. Type sizes and alignment would be experimented with to see how this could potentially work with the photographic elements.