You can get hit by a bus tomorrow — why is global warming your problem?
Art direction and posters for social campaign by Brandalism against UN’s Climate Change conference COP21
— The campaign
Brandalism is a widely known international artist collective that “revolt against the corporate control of culture and space”. In 2015, they started a campaign against UN’s COP21, and its support by big corporations, who are the very cause of the climate change issue. For this campaign, they invited a number of artists, including Jonathan Barnbrook, whom I was lucky enough to be working for at the time. We were asked to pitch a series of posters focusing on our critical view on the big corporations’ global environmental policies and their contribution to global warming.
— Linear collaboration
We were also paired with an amazing photographer, Immo Klink, to feature some of his images on our designs. Immo handed us a series of film noir inspired black and white portraits, capturing powerful, evil characters. We didn’t have much say in his input, but they were inspiring enough to get us started. Elif went away and sketched ideas around how to tell the story of these characters using powerful language. With a curious to explore copywriting, which is typically outside of our usual comfort zone, we aimed to emphasise the sarcasm and indifference of these portrayed personas. We constructed each piece of copy first, before moving onto designing the layout. We consciously used a very contrasting visual style to the photography that disrupted the classic aesthetic of black and white studio shots. The colour marks mimicked overdeveloped and partially burnt analog photography and the imperfect ink lettering added a vandalised feel to the posters.
— The outcome
The contributions from all the artists were inserted on bus stops in Paris overnight during the conference, and received massive social media attention.
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