Background:
Global warming is one of the biggest pressing issues that we face as a whole. The rising temperatures of the Earth can create many natural disasters, effect animals, humans, and different climates. Climate change is a huge problem for everyone and if things do not change, the Earth will not be able to recover from the damage we have caused. This a very serious issue and there are people that do not think it is real, which is even more of a problem to then create change. Global warming impacts anyone and everyone, it should be important to everyone to want to take care of the Earth better. Where do we start? How can we reduce our carbon footprint and not emit anymore pollution onto this Earth? These are very complicated and difficult questions to answer, but answers that need to be figured out.
Subject Matter:
My project idea would shift my focus towards design. How can we graphic designs create work without impacting the environment or can we create work that really does zero harm? There is a lot of ways that we can try to be better, but it is a complicated issue to not have any impact on the Earth while creating projects. I will focus on how complicated and unclear the answers are, and how they contradict themselves. As a graphic designer and someone who loves design, I want to be able to create designs that have no impact on the Earth and are fully sustainable without taking up natural resources.
Audience:
This idea would be targeted towards graphic designers to get them thinking and more aware of how much negative impact their work can have on climate change. Graphic designers are my major audience I am designing for, but it also includes all designers, print shops, and companies that use designs/prints for advertisements and such.
My zine was my main focus point in this project as I wanted it to be full of text that was researched but also very expressive. It took me a while to design each image and illustration, each one went through many iterations to get to where it is. I had a very hard time getting the single page illustrations to where they currently are and spent a lot of time trying use different patterns that ultimately did not work well enough. The zine took a lot of brainstorming and thinking about different ways that I could represent the issues of climate change within graphic design. I started to think about very traditional elements of graphic design such as letters and type which lead me to my full spread images. Each one does a good job representing the different issues and what ways within design that cause issues.
For my poster, I originally wanted to show a ball of rubber bands/yarn that gives an abstract view of the Earth and how the issues are confusing with no immediate solution. As a problem solver I wanted to show a solution to the issue of climate change and design 100% clean to the earth. As I researched, I realized that there is no solution yet, so I shifted to showing the mess this issue with no end. That poster got a little too abstract, so I completely changed to a more literal approach of designing a better tomorrow. I decided to illustrate the designing and added text that shows how we can design better and reduce resources. There is no solid answer to designing with zero impact on the Earth, but we can greatly reduce our impact till we figure out the next solution. For both parts of this project, they were to be printed on environmentally friendly paper with environmentally ink as well. As I was deciding to make this project, I did not want to make it hypocritical and use up paper and ink that add to the issues at hand. Due to Covid-19, this project has not been printed yet.
