Toxics Link, Plastic Ban and an Environment Film Festival
Toxics Link is a Delhi based environmental NGO dedicated to bring toxics related information into the public domain, both relating to struggles and problems at the grassroots as well as global information to the local levels.
Tiffinbox worked on redesigning their brochure in the latter half of 2015. We were approached again in the beginning of 2016 to work on a small poster campaign on the plastic ban in West Bengal, and to work on print collaterals for an environment film festival to be held in December 2016.
Brochure: The redesign was aimed at putting across the point that the NGO is a link between a toxic environment and a clean-healthy world, a vital link that through information and awareness can help rid our lives (and the world) of harmful toxins.
The covers are slightly bigger in size than the inside pages, so when we open the brochure we see a red page on the left, full of toxins shown through icons, and a blue page on the right, full of leaves representing a toxin free world. And when we flip through the pages we metaphorically go from a toxic world to a clean world, aided by the work of Toxics Link detailed out in the inside pages.
Brochure
The cover was designed as an extension of the tree canopy present in the Toxics Link logo, which goes on to take the shape of the earth to convey positivity and growth. Red and blue, the brand colours, were used throughout the brochure (a few pages shown here), including full-page illustrations. Clean and minimal, these illustrations portrayed the key programme areas of Toxics Link: bio-medical wastes (illu. 1), electronic, hazardous and industrial, municipal, radioactive, and plastic wastes (illu. 2) and chemicals in products (illu. 3).
Why use a plastic bag?
There’s a ban on plastic bags (less than 20 microns) in West Bengal since 2003. Toxics Link initiated a campaign to distribute posters to businesses at the grassroots level that use plastic bags, like grocery shops, vegetable and fruit carts, etc. The posters were aimed at influencing people who would come to these places everyday to buy stuff in the hope of influencing a behavioural change. The messaging was to force people to think what price earth will pay for using a plastic bag with a usage lifespan of just 10 minutes. The reverse side of this poster had suggestions in the form of alternatives to the plastic bags.
Quotes from the earth: An environment film festival
With an agenda to highlight environmental challenges at the national and international level through films, this was a two day event that brought together persistent and persuasive films from all over the world.
Thus, the central idea for the poster was inspired by the awe-inspiring and dramatic photograph of the Earth taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe at the request of Carl Sagan and later presented by him calling it the pale blue dot. The two notions of ‘quotes from the earth’ and the ‘pale blue dot’ were combined together in the illustration of the six themes for this year’s film festival as a speech blurb above a tiny graphic of the earth.