Viewing climate change from a different perspective

This is one of the oldest project I was part of with my mates at Tiffinbox and possibly the best team effort of ours till date. The reasons are a few, such as, we still don’t think it looks bad (like all old projects tend to), we worked so hard on them (both design as well as research), this project falls at the centre of what all our combined hearts beat for (the environment) and what the posters say are still 100% relevant today. And, lastly, attached to this project are fond memories of the first year of Tiffinbox.

CMS, as part of their environment film festival in 2008, commissioned us to conceptualise and produce a poster series on climate change that would be showcased in a travelling exhibition alongside the film festival. This exhibition + festival travelled to eight cities across India in this order: Leh, Agartala, Coimbatore, Bhopal, Ranchi, Pune, Lucknow and Hyderabad.

Client Name
Centre for Media Studies

Campaign Poster

Illustration

Lettering

CMS’s brief was to highlight some key topics on climate change in the form of illustrated posters. What they had in mind was 4 to 5 posters but we instead proposed a series of 13 posters, each poster containing an alphabet from ‘climate change’ on a size of 3x4 feet. When all the posters would come together on display, they would read ‘climate change’ from afar. This was at a macro level.

AT A MICRO LEVEL: As a person approached these posters finer details were revealed. One could see rampant deforestation changing the face of our landscape, melting icebergs eating away penguins’ habitat, drought conditions having an impact on the agricultural yield and so on. Each poster dealt with a different issue pertaining to climate change. The first seven posters (reading climate) dealt with topics focussed on the basics of climate change such as — What (is climate change), why (is the climate changing), effect (of climate change), (affect on) food, water, health, biodiversity. And the next six posters (reading change) talked about ways to deal with the problem such as — adaptation, solutions and committing to a better climate. Within ‘change’ we literally talked about it and offered a positive scenario.

THOUGHT BEHIND THE DESIGN: All posters were planned as aerial views. Making people see the situation from a bird’s eye view is what’s needed to deal with a reality like climate change. Standing on the ground we only seem to notice what’s going on in our immediate surroundings and we do not care for (or are aware of) what’s happening thousands of kilometres away. But for a healthy planet, we need to look at our globe in totality since climate affects all of us.

The design of these posters was kept as bold as possible, almost shouting for attention because that’s what climate change required, then as well as now. But at the same time we tried to steer clear of any apocalyptic imagery or language and tried to keep it as simple and relatable as possible.

The 13th poster is the concluding poster which urges the viewers to sign onto the poster to show solidarity in the fight against climate change.

N & G POSTERS: As these posters were part of a travelling festival, it was decided to use the N and G posters to talk about climate change with a regional reference and discuss the threats faced by cities this exhibition travelled to. Agartala posters touched upon biodiversity and water + bamboo; Bhopal highlighted tiger habitats and soybean crops; Coimbatore showcased Nilgiris and corals; Lucknow dealt with Ganga and sugarcane crops; Pune figured sea forts and western ghats, and Ranchi had thermal power plants and mining to worry about.

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