This infographic turns Alpine Water Trust's headline finding, a generation-long fifth drop in alpine water storage, into a single visual story that scales from a technical report to a general audience. Built once and cropped three ways, it must carry thirty years of hydrological data with full honesty about uncertainty, while remaining sharp enough to stop someone walking past a poster.
Overview & Goals
- Communicate the fifth-drop finding as one unmistakable, memorable number
- Extend the story from around 400 specialist report readers to press, conference attendees and a wider public
- Present uncertainty ranges transparently so the chart withstands scientific scrutiny
- Produce one adaptable design system rather than three separate designs
Budget & Timeline
A draft is due within five weeks so it can pass through scientific review, with every figure traceable back to the source tables. Following review, final adjustments are made and print-ready files are delivered by the end of October, ahead of the November report launch.
Print production
- Logo files
- Vector file (SVG, AI, EPS or PDF)
- 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
- Handover
- Print-ready PDF for our printer
- 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.
- Print colors
- Not defined yet
Target Audience
The core audience is a small group of hydrologists and specialists who already read the full report, but the real objective is reaching far beyond them through press materials and conference exposure.
Style
Typography
Chosen
- Alpine Water TrustNeutral & functional · GrotesqueExample typeface: Inter. A starting point, not a requirement.
Colour
New color direction
Muted & natural
Greens, clay and stone. Understated, organic, unhurried.
Examples of the mood. The final colors are part of the job.
For print
The new palette has to be defined for print as well: CMYK values for four-color process, and Pantone or HKS for any color that must match exactly.
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
- A1 portrait poster design for conference display
- Two-page A4 spread adaptation for the printed report
- Cropped social media version of the same design
- Custom data visualization of snow, glacier and runoff figures with uncertainty ranges shown
- Print-ready PDF handover for the client's printer
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Show every uncertainty range, never a clean line that hides the error margin
- Make one number the thing a person remembers after walking past
- Keep every figure traceable back to the source spreadsheet for review
- Design the layout so a correction to one data point does not require rebuilding the whole piece
Don't
- Do not use a red-to-green color scale, since a meaningful share of readers cannot distinguish it
- Do not simplify the methodology into a version the team would have to defend
- Do not treat the poster, spread and social crop as three separate designs
- Do not present any figure without its uncertainty range visible