Unpaved Paradise

Projects in Graphic Design
Fall 2024

This assignment challenged us to advocate for a topic of our choosing by developing a design campaign. This campaign could use only two words, the rest of the message had to be made apparent with the design choices.

Process

Concept

I wanted to highlight mindless corporate urban construction and advocate for nature to be reinstated. This was depicted as the replacement of large unused parking lots with green spaces or gardens. I was inspired by an image I came across in my research that depicted a flower sprouting from a crack in an empty parking lot. This perfectly encapsulated the themes of nature returning to consume urban landscapes that I wanted to focus on.

Goals

My goal was to separate the deliverables into two categories; one showing the gentle beauty of nature slowly retaking urban landscapes, and the other showing the urgency of the situation. These would take form as two posters using different color palettes to evoke contrasting emotions while delivering the same message.

One poster uses greens and yellows enforcing ideas of growth, sunlight and rebirth and the other uses reds, blacks and harsh textures to enforce ideas of death and pain. The flowers in the red and black poster appear as if they are being suffocated by the concrete parking lot as opposed to overtaking it in the green and yellow version. All additional iterations of these two posters follow the same themes; conquering and being overpowered.

Iterations

The ideation process started out with collecting visual assets that would re-enforced the themes of my project. I eventually landed on a collage look for my posters, as I felt this was the best way to draw from real life while allowing me to maintain compositional control. In these initial posters I was experimenting with different ways to incorporate the urban parking lot assets I had collected with colorful nature centred assets. Keeping the flower breaking through concrete idea in mind, I worked to balance and combine these assets in a way that would reference this mental image.