Alpine Water Trust needs one infographic, built once and cropped three ways, to carry a single hard finding past its usual 400 readers and into a poster hall, a printed report and a social feed. The job is to make thirty years of snow, ice and runoff data read as an argument at a glance, without smoothing away the uncertainty that makes it credible.
Overview & Goals
- Land one number, alpine water storage down roughly a fifth in a generation, as the thing people remember after walking past
- Translate 42 stations of snow water equivalent, 11 glaciers of mass balance and three catchments of modelled runoff into a single readable visual argument
- Show every uncertainty range honestly so the piece cannot be dismissed as oversimplified science
- Design once, crop three ways, so the poster, the report spread and the social version read as one coherent piece, not three different pitches
Budget & Timeline
A draft is due within five weeks so it can clear scientific review with time to spare, then final files are locked by the end of October to make the November report deadline. The build should be structured so a post-review correction is a quick edit, not a redesign.
Print production
- Format
- A1 portrait for the poster, with a two-page A4 spread version for the report and a cropped version for social. One design, three crops, not three designs.
- Where it's used
- Displayed
- Print run & paper
- 50 posters on matte 170gsm for the conferences. The report version is printed with the report, 800 copies.
- Content
- Has to be created
- Finishing
- Matte lamination
- Data source
- Thirty years of snow water equivalent measurements from 42 stations, annual glacier mass balance for 11 glaciers, and modelled runoff for three catchments. All of it in spreadsheets with the methodology documented. Every figure has an uncertainty range that must be shown, not hidden.
Target Audience
The primary audience is now people who will never open the spreadsheet: press, conference attendees and the general public encountering the finding for the first time, alongside the roughly 400 regular report readers who already trust the methodology.
Style
Colour
Direction chosen
Muted & natural
Greens, clay and stone. Understated, organic, unhurried.
Examples of the mood, not the colours anyone has to use.
In the client's own words
Every year we publish a report on the state of alpine water: how much is stored as snow and ice, where it goes, and how that has changed over thirty years. The report is read by about four hundred people. The number that matters, which is that the storage has fallen by roughly a fifth in a generation, deserves to be seen by many more. We want one large infographic that carries that story on its own, for the report, the press pack and a poster at the two conferences we attend. We are hydrologists, not designers, and we know the data is not the same thing as the argument.
Scope & Deliverables
- Master infographic design covering the full dataset and headline finding
- A1 portrait poster crop for conference display
- A4 two page spread crop for the printed report
- Cropped social version for wider public reach
- Source-traceable chart build so every figure can be checked against the spreadsheet tables
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Show every uncertainty range on every chart, never a bare line or bar
- Make one number the takeaway a person remembers after a few seconds
- Keep every figure traceable back to the source spreadsheet tables for scientific review
- Design one system that crops cleanly to poster, spread and social
Don't
- Do not use a red to green scale, a meaningful share of readers cannot separate them
- Do not simplify the methodology into a claim the Trust would have to walk back
- Do not hide or round away the uncertainty ranges to make the chart look cleaner
- Do not treat the three formats as three separate design jobs