High Seas Branding

High Seas Branding

Software: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, MAPublisher
Client: The Pew Charitable Trusts, Protecting Ocean Life on the High Seas

This campaign, aimed at securing an international treaty to protect the High Seas, remains one of my all-time favorites and is arguably my most collaborative project. Instead of evolving over time, I branded the campaign from the start with a textured, hand-drawn look-and-feel I applied to print, video, and social media assets. The keystone element that drove the evolution of the design is a short animation explaining the rich biodiversity of the High Seas and the threats it endures. The animation originated as a stop-motion, but due to time constraints the editor migrated the project to After Effects. To maintain the stop-motion quality, we printed, hand-cut, and photographed all of the elements before bringing them back into a digital space. The background was stitched together from six 24”x36” watercolor paintings. 

Print/web deliverables included an illustrated explainer infographic designed to be easily broken into social tiles.

Photography was a crucial element of the social strategy, and Pew purchased photo rights from Pelagic Life, a photo collective. I used some of their photos in a quiz distributed to UN members.

The following figures are more recent pieces that were not part of the initial campaign. However, the branding guidelines I established and the illustration library that I built for the video gave me the flexibility to apply consistent styling to new products.