Green Living Project
About
The Green Living Series is a series of 7 illustrated posters, designed to draw attention ,and highlight important tissues relating to sustainability an climate change. These posters both explain hallmarks of the current situation, as well as provide different solutions that people can work towards to address these issues.
This project has been exhibited at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign YMCA, in an exhibition titled: Whatever She Imagines.
Timeline
August 2022 to December 2021 (About 3 weeks)
Programs Used
Photoshop | InDesign
Skills & Practices
Poster Design | Research | Illustration
What I Designed
All posters in the series
Finalized Poster Designs
Every poster was illustrated in Photoshop, using my Wacom tablet, and then exported to InDesign to lay out the type. In the future, I think it would be interesting to adapt these into an informational book so the images and text have breathing room, and I can go into more detail about climate change, sustainability, climate policy, solutions, etc.
About Each Poster
Community Garden
This poster is of a utopian future where people in all cities grow their own gardens full of produce. This not only helps foster good neighborly relations, but it also good for the environment, making habitat for wildlife, and improving mood with a pop of green.
Climate Change
This poster gives a darker reality where the world is overtaken by extreme weather conditions, and the aftermath of this change in climate forces people to move elsewhere. This also kills off wildlife who are no longer adapted properly to survive in more severe conditions.
Struggling Industries
This poster highlights the issues that come with changing climates. Droughts can lead to failed crop and no wildlife, flooding from increased severe weather events and drought can completely decimate a region or town. Issues with increased ocean acidity can disrupt the ecosystem, and create a struggling fishing industry.
Rebirth
This poster is of a magical renewal of the world, as people everywhere embrace sustainable industries, an work together to make a global economy that is a lot less wasteful and harmful. The imagery is supposed to evoke a phoenix, and acknowledge that the fate of the world is in the hands of humanity.
Give & Take
The counterbalance to Rebirth, this poster is about depleting different environments and destroying life there. The imagery is supposed to be of a lemon, or any juicy berry, being squeezed of its juice, or in tis case, the Earth being squeezed of its resources without anyone doing anything to replace the ones lost.
Basin
This poster explores the possibility to creating artificial basins full of photosynthesizing plants and phytoplankton in order to combat CO2 emissions. Oceans are able to absorb the most CO2 out of any environment in the world. If we can figure out a way to do this, new homes can be made for different species, and a new way of combating harmful carbon dioxide can be made.
Saxifrage
This poster highlights the plight of a specific plant that grows in high elevations. Due to climate change and global warming, the elevation that this plant is native to have become too warm for it to survive. Slowly, it has been grown further and further up. This is supposed to also call to attention the fact that there are plenty of other plant and animal species suffering similar fates, having to migrate to places they haven't been before in order to live.
Initial Sketches
For this project, I wanted to create posters that brought awareness to issues within climate change, but that also laid out various solutions to the issues shown. Trying to think of interesting layouts was a challenge at first, and many of the designs I have in my sketchbook pages here did not make it to the final stage of poster development.
Digital Iterations
The process to create each poster was lengthy, and full of trial and error. I made a lot of iterations over many hours before I began the process of finalization. The amount of research that went into each poster was extensive. More info about each sketch is in the captions.
The community garden idea was going to be a residential garden paradise, but that felt a bit too unrealistic. So this idea was scrapped.
The Overpopulation and weather idea was going to be vertical, to highlight the height of the approaching storm. But in order to capture the people and the city at a better scale, I decided to make it horizontal
The starvation plate was originally going to be a poster exclusively on fishing. But that topic felt too specific compared to everything else. Therefore, I expanded it into starvation due to struggling industries across the world.
Another fishing poster initial sketch idea. This was minimized and added to the final starvation plate poster.
The initial design for the basin poster. I decided to add more color and contrast to make it more visually appealing.
The initial idea for the rebirth poster was to have the earth shed all its waste into the universe, coming out clean. The imagery was meant to be reminiscent of a phoenix. This version of the idea felt very sci-fi though, and not as human centered as I wanted it to be.
Another version of the rebirth (sci-fi) poster.
The initial idea for the saxifrage poster was to have it decay as you look at the lower elevations, only thriving at the top close to the viewer. This was a bit too complex though, and I simplified the idea in the final poster design.
This was supposed to be another idea for the saxifrage poster, but I didn't think that the horizontal layout fit the design I was going for, so I switched it up to be vertical.
This was the initial concept for the Earth squeeze resource poster. I wanted it to be like squeezing a lemon, but I felt that this design didn't highlight the proper image I wanted to reflect. I also couldn't figure out how to lay out the text here..
"This series of posters allowed me to explore my favorite topics, illustration, design, climate change, animals, and severe weather. I want to do more projects that focus on these areas in the future as climate change and climate policy are important topics that affect literally everyone in some way. Thank you so much for looking through my work."
-C.P.