Description:

Trawling is a destructive fishing practice that involves dragging a large, heavy net along the seabed to reel in lucrative hauls of fish, crustaceans, and other organisms. Trawlers use two heavy weights, known as ‘doors’, to stretch the opening of the net and sustain a wide breadth to capture the highest volume of fish. Habitats in the path of the net are crushed and smothered. Trawling is criticised extensively for greediness, carelessness and the unwavering destruction in Aotearoa, especially in the Hauraki Gulf. To protect the Hauraki Gulf, the development of an awareness campaign became crucial, one that strives to educate New Zealanders on the severe repercussions of trawling.

Guard our Gulf symbolises the Hauraki Gulf’s fleeting, vulnerable nature through a decaying typographic system. Endeavouring to encapsulate the ephemeral and fragile essence of the Hauraki Gulf through typography, Guard our Gulf fosters a sense of urgency and responsibility among audiences to protect and preserve the invaluable natural resource of the Marine Park. Through the adept fusion of design and message, mirroring the status of the Marine Park, Guard our Gulf’s initiative intends to galvanise, surrounding a compelling sense of communal responsibility, mobilising responsive audiences.

Glyphs shift from a sharp and strong appearance, to one that is blurred and warped — blending together. Blurred sections become speckled and made of particles, conveying a vanishing that intends to echo the decaying state of the Hauraki Gulf due to trawling. In order to properly exhibit the vanishing effect, each of the works use light backgrounds to house the dark typography. Creating a strong contrast, the campaign refrains from using playful, saturated colours to avoid traditional association. Black and white are very stark and, when composed as opposites, foster a serious tone. Contrast is not only present in the absence of colour, but through scale, complementing the loud, urgent, tendentious campaign.
Scale has been used to crowd the audience through a reduction of negative space, constraining the eye to absorb the decaying effects and understand the messaging. These are made to appear larger through the supplementary headings, deliberately scaled down to create a sense of space and depth.

Provocative and defiant language combined with a root in sincerity assembles the fighting talk of Guard our Gulf. Guard our Gulf strives to use words to present an unvarnished truth, accomplished through the use of uncompromising language that challenges and provokes. Seeking to engage with people deeply, the campaign strives to cut through complacency and craft a feeling of the urgency in audience. Using metaphorical eye-opening language strives to omit generic phrases that do not evoke new ideas and, consequently, bore the audience.

Complementing the short and sharp nature of the rhetoric, the posters at the centre of the campaign employ a central alignment to occupy the most space and, consequently, spark confrontation. Each phrase employed uses short, singular syllable words. Composing these at a large scale, with a central alignment, means each of the few words are stacked on top of each other; Shorter words of a similar length assemble vertically to form a blocky silhouette of density that catches the eye. These word pairings use rhyming conventions and repetition for memorability, and, most crucially, for legibility. Similar words ease the experience of comprehending a poster that is abusing scale to shout.

Guard our Gulf is accompanied by a campaign manual that is designed to educate smaller organisations on the problem, the response, and the way they can use the collateral to encourage change — Acting as a crutch for the campaign, where it can be used and perpetuated by multiple people and not tied to one organisation.

Guard our Gulf passionately symbolises the urgent need to protect the Hauraki Gulf from destructive trawling through compelling design and messaging, aiming to galvanise collective responsibility and preserve this invaluable marine ecosystem.