Brief 2: Born Free Visuals

I wanted to include some illustrative elements to my promotional material, as I have been trying to keep up using no photography, and just visuals that I have created myself. Alongside this I was keen to create something quite striking that would grab viewers and draw their attention to the situation in a memorable way.

My initial idea was to outline the animals in question with some sort of pattern, perhaps following the way they appear, and taking parts of it away to exhibit the deterioration of the species as a whole.

I started taking some parts of the image away to show how the population of the animal is decreasing, by exhibiting one animal as the 'bigger picture'.

After trying this I found that the image was running the risk of not clearly showing what the animal was from taking away elements of the way it looks. However, I had a second idea inspired by a typeface I designed over summer:

I thought that in the style I had drawn up the image, I could show the 'ink' to be melting away from the drawing, also depicting a sense of deterioration.

I did  the illustrations of the other featured animals in the same way as this, slightly changing the pattern style for each animal.

In order to attract an audience and hold their attention enough for them to want to do something about it, I did some research into some facts about each animals danger of extinction, and chose those I found were really worrying or shocking. I wanted to use these for the poster designs in conjunction with the illustrations to act as a caption for the images.

• The world has lost 97% of it's tiger population in the past century. At it's current rate, tigers will be extinct within the next decade.
• Gorillas share 98% of their DNA with humans, but are still kept in small enclosures and cages although they share multiple platforms of intelligence with humans.
• The average life expectancy of an Orca is 70. 92% of the orcas in Seaworld do not live past the age of 25.
• In the last 30 years the population of elephants has decreased by 53%. Elephants are often killed to harvest ivory, and because of this large groups of elephants could be extinct by 2020.
• In the past 20 years, the population of lions in Africa has depleted by 48%, leaving less than 32,000 lions left in the world.

Before incorporating type into the posters, I assigned a colour to each animal which resembled either their habitat or the specific identifying colour of the animal, if applicable.. Each would allow my to use both black and white for the images and type.

I tried a few block typefaces but eventually landed on Nexa, which is easy to read from a distance, the heavier weighting being perfect for embodying bold statements. I put emphasis on the numbers to draw in viewers to the statistics.

I realised that I would need to include some information about the Foundation itself and how to direct the public towards getting involved, so I used the information provided on their website of each animal and what they do, or would hope to do for them.

I landed on two ideas in terms of layout, and was undecided on which was the better option so I asked around to gather people's opinion and was happy to go with the majority. Ideally the layout I land on would be applicable to all the images so that they would be recognisable as a series.

The conclusion when asking around was that the second option was better, as isolating the image in the page gave more of an impact. I followed this same layout for the remaining posters: