The Truth About Climate Change:
A Narrative
An interactive story that both visually illustrates the breakdown of the Arctic due to climate change and informs about its consequences
(2019)
This is an interactive narrative created to inform about climate change, using the arctic as a case study, by using a visual aid to emphasize the physical impacts of climate change on the environment. These physical impacts are realized through many of the design changes made in this: the color gradation, the hand-drawn symbols, the type choices, and the page design. One thing to point out is the timeline along the left side of the story, which represents the sea level over time. This serves as a constant visual reminder to the reader that these changes are continuing to happen even as they read this narrative.
As mentioned, the hand-drawn elements were another way to represent the transient nature of the content being written about. Along with this, I felt they were a bit of a call back to scientific illustrations. The texture was created by drawing the images on textured paper, and then using the program adobe capture to vectorize the forms.
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A Flip Through
The narrative is made to be mounted on a wall and flipped through, so that the shadows cast onto the piece emphasize the jagged edges of the pages. While adding visual interest, this also works to further the likeness the pages have to ice. With this flip through, you can also see the color gradation of the pages, which goes from a pure white to a desaturated icey-blue.
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Original Idea
My first idea was to create the pages themselves break down as you flipped through. To do this, I was going to mount the content on transparent vellum and have the size of the content on each page shrink as you flipped. While this was a good idea in theory, when I created a physical prototype of the book, I realized it was not as effective as I had wished. Fitting all of the content onto the small pages was inefficient and difficult to read. This is why I deviated into a new direction.
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Color Choices
To further emphasize the breaking down of the ice caps, the major point of this narrative, I wanted to use a gradient as you flip through the pages. I wanted to choose something that was not too bright or saturated and that was light enough so that the smaller text was still easily visible. A blue gradient would emphasize the idea of ice melting into water, whereas the gray gradient could emphaszie the pollution of the water. I ended up bringing the two together a bit by using a more gray-tinted blue.
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Timeline
On the left side of the page, there is a timeline of the change in sea level over time. I thought this would be a great way to root the information in reality as you read through it. It gives an actual example of the effects of climate change being discussed in the narrative. As you flip the pages, a place is marked on the timeline to show where you are.
