This month Greenpeace announced their plans to oppose the expansion of Heathrow Airport and introduced Airplot, a campaign with an identity designed by Airside, to question the construction of a third runway.
In 2008 Greenpeace secretly bought a plot of land within Heathrow’s proposed expansion zone and asked Airside to develop an identity that would be able to weather the storms of what could be a very long, unpredictable and difficult protest.
With the need for clear communication amongst fast changing circumstances, Airside’s goal was to create an identity that would stretch much further than a single logo. Greenpeace’s latest campaign would have to communicate many different things to many different people and considering Airplot’s abstract form of protest, Airside made a conscious decision to make what needs to be communicated central to the identity. A volatile campaign such as this needed a language.
Protest marks are often quite confrontational, which considering their cause is entirely understandable, but for this campaign Airside wanted to create something a lot more conspiratorial, reflecting a more intelligent form of protest that Airplot represented. Acknowledging that land was central to Greenpeace’s protest, Airside created an identity based on the colours and shapes synonymous with the rural fields Airplot seeked to occupy.
Abstracting the iconic imagery of how patchwork fields look when viewed from above, we developed the Airplot typeface: an alphabet of letters and blocks consisting of 3 weights (thin, medium and thick), which were hand-printed onto paper and scanned back into the computer. With this typeface we can easily create blocks of type that mirror the ebb and flow of the countryside’s fields.
The typeface was used to create a Airplot logo-type which is able to comfortably house the changing call to actions that Greenpeace’s needs to communicate. Not only does this function well on a representational level, conveying the duplicity of the fields Greenpeace occupies but it allows the type to be set across whatever space or media the identity needs to occupy.
Using this graphic language we have created a graphic language that allows Greenpeace to render Airplot’s rapidly changing messages and call to actions in a way that is instantly linked to Airplot’s identity and is recognisably Greenpeace. This way the things Greenpeace need to communicate within the identity can remain current, relevent and for a project with such a long term scope, consistent.
The logo is the first stage of our collaboration with Greenpeace and we will continue to document the project as the rollout continues.
[...] New Work: Greenpeace Presents Airplot [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 12:27 pm (GMT)and delicious delivery.
again, thank you.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:55 pm (GMT)[...] We were surprised to find our Airplot branding was to be seen in the most recent episode of Channel 4’s Peephow. [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 3:48 pm (GMT)[...] Airside: Process Airside, Process — Jamie at 2:57 pm Airside’s modular Airplot identity [...]
December 29th, 2009 at 3:58 pm (GMT)