Update: Monday 5th October 2020

Hello there!

Welcome to my blog! I decided that this would be a great way of tracking my progress throughout my design projects, both for myself and others. Do make yourself at home. I plan to update this blog every weekday, to motivate myself to find/produce at least one thing worth discussion on this website daily.

Today, I’ve started work on a new project: a YCN competition brief. Out of four options, I chose one set by the Met Office. If you’re unfamiliar, the Met Office is a national weather service in the UK. Founded in 1854, it was created to help people to make better decisions and thrive by having access to the best weather and climate information when it matters most. As a company, they assist the government, businesses, emergency responders and more.

In-keeping with their mission to advance global understanding through research, they intend to engage with a new target audience of 18-25 year olds to increase the reach of Met Office as a brand and a relevant, authoritative voice in climate science. Their proposed solution for this is an illustration, informed by the decades of scientific research conducted by the organisation, to visualise the changing climate. It must simplify the numbers into a tangible visual, to encourage action from a younger demographic. The intention is to apply this illustration to environmentally friendly coffee cups, bottles, t-shirts and the like, to spread the brand’s message in a natural way. As such, the design must be simple enough to work on these mediums.

I’ve commenced my research by looking at the data that Met Office provided with the brief. It’s certainly alarming to see in such plain terms how quickly the climate is being affected. I would consider myself environmentally conscious in day-to-day life; I’m a vegan and only purchase second hand clothes, so those choices definitely make me think about sustainability daily. Therefore, I fit perfectly into the demographic that the Met Office has set for the brief. Personally, I had little awareness that the Met Office provided research on the climate before undertaking this brief. I knew they were a leading figure in terms of weather patterns, so this demonstrates that I need to do more research into the brand itself, to find out what I can communicate to other members of my age group unaware of the extensive nature of the Met Office’s work.

Warming Stripes, Prof. Ed Hawkins

In terms of how the provided data can link to visuals, I’ve discovered a series of infographics produced by Professor Ed Hawkins, a climatologist. Named ‘Warming Stripes’, these pictures use a key to visually communicate the change in temperature in the world and specific areas over a certain time frame. This method is a very effective way of communicated the drastic nature of our current situation, as it transcends language – any observer can see a change for the worse due to a clever usage of colour theory. The barcode-esque results are certainly transfixing.

UK warming stripes (1883-2017), Prof. Ed Hawkins

The above diagram shows a focus on the changing climate in specific cities in the UK. This interests me in this specific project because I feel like often, people don’t associate climate change with happening around their city – only in the typically reported places, such as the Poles, Australia, et cetera. Looking at the data used for these infographics could provide an insight into an alternative method to visually communicate a more local climate emergency than most people realise.

Jill Pelto for TIME Magazine, 2020

Jill Pelto is an American artist and scientist. This year, she was commissioned by TIME Magazine to produce a watercolour piece for one of their July 2020 covers. In the painting, I love how effectively she has merged visual data from graphs with real life textures and objects, to easily communicate which graph relates to which part of the climate. All of these different elements combine together to form a landscape of sorts, however I feel like the subversion of showing typically rather flat surfaces (such as the sea) as angling upwards really does imbue a sense of alarm into the viewer. This successful cohesion between data and visual elements will serve well as an inspiration for my own work.