Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Main goal of communication about climate change as I see it — is to underline, that some of coming shifts will be irreversible, at least in the short time — e. g. average human lifespan. In fact, it will not go away for whole generations to come (source data states durations ranging from few hundreds to thousand years). The process itself goes through few critical interconnected “tipping” points, e.g. concentration of CO2 in atmosphere. They together are creating the chain, like falling pieces in Dominoes game, where each them, when triggered, triggers continuously another ones. So, there are more of points of “no return” for the humans. I tried to outline this situation through simple infographics, using specific “printing" procedure.

Production of media with ecological messages should consider “footprint" of the design itself. Therefore, I decided to use old, trashed posters with one side already printed. There were useless, at least in the common settings of offset production, and it ceased to be “content-exclusive”, too. It led me to employing the laser plotter, usually used for cutting out the shapes e.g. nets of the boxes or 3D models. In the design — I adapted usage of this technology to get 2D drawings, readable on the blank backside of the recycled posters.

Besides saving the paper and the colors, the laser-cutting causes that the cut paper gets traces of burning around the drawing, because of overheating. I used this “unwanted” side-effect as part of the message and intentionally designed the drawing to burn more in desired parts of it. The goal was to underline the message of critical “tipping” points described above.

It resulted in the series of three posters covering selected causes, with its data of quantities (CO2, Methane, temperature via Celsius degrees) displayed as the groups of almost repetitive, subtly changing infographic icons showing continual change, leading to critical point, where the paper started to burn properly, with the flame.

The following distribution of the posters went in guerilla style — I tried to display the posters in the frequent public spaces to cause that the not-so-common burned poster will drag some attention to its message.

I was — partially — inspired by the name of the book Farrenheit 451 written by American writer Ray Bradbury. The name means the temperature, in which (book) paper burns. Speaking of climate change bringing the rise for global temperature, it seemed to be (more than) appropriate.
In collaboration with Ivan Galdik.