Walk the Walk by Marina Willer for 29 Posters for the Planet

We appreciate collaborative efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues, especially when they come from places where the focus is not normally on conservation. Design agencies are generally designed to sell more stuff. Publishers are generally designed to use ex-trees to communicate stuff. But some designers are on the other side of the consumer behavior-influencing fence. And some publishers use those ex-trees to publicize a more tree-centric future.  Ethics sometimes prevail over ambition. Education sometimes jumps the line.

Professional communities–whether design firms, publishers, hotel companies or take your pick–all have latent collective action lurking in their futures. We hope nature and culture are the beneficiaries. Thanks in particular at this moment to publisher Phaidon, which is in itself worthy of a post on its series of environmentally-friendly books and initiatives, for bringing this initiative of design firm Pentagram to our attention:

Pentagram’s carbon free foot print

Design agency works with Do The Green Thing charity on environmentally friendly posters

The gulf between our high-consumption lifestyles and the kind of sustainable world many of us hope to inhabit is vast. Yet the changes that could take us there aren’t unthinkable, as our recent book, The World We Made, makes clear.

David Shrigley’s poster for Do The Green Thing

In common with Jonathon Porritt, the author of The World We Made the Environmental pressure group, Do The Green Thing, hopes to make those changes more attractive. The charity, which has close ties to the world-renowned design agency, Pentagram, works with key figures within the creative industries to produce handsome looking posters, that make environmentally sound choices, such as cycling to work, darning old clothes, and eating ugly vegetables, more palatable to most.

Michael Beirut’s poster for Do The Green Thing

Now, to highlight the WWF’s Earth Hour initiative on March 29, Do The Green Thing has produced 29 posters along similar lines. There are works by Pentagram’s Michael Beirut, Paula Scher, Abbott Miller, and Natasha Jen; as the artist David Shrigley, Google’s Tom Uglow, the milliner Philip Treacy, graphic designer Neville Brody, British fashion photographer, Rankin, fashion designer Paul Smith, and illustrator Quentin Blake.

Read the whole article here.