Corporate achievements are a necessary evil especially if you’re getting your funds and resources from donors, investors, etc. One of the ways to showcase this is usually through a glossy/sexy annual report. For 2010-2011, UNISDR, the UN’s office for disaster risk reduction, wanted to highlight it’s main accomplishments in a visual way. In addition to developing an infographic I wanted to conceptualize and visualize the whole idea of disaster risk reduction – something that is generally difficult to visualize since there’s a variety of moving parts (i.e. government leadership, private sector business continuity plans, infrastructure development, urban planning, etc.).
Originally, the idea was to have a map highlighting a few key stats and to show the UNISDR’s global reach. But as the idea came together, it was more and more difficult to capture everything in a map. Maps are great for 2-3 key data sets, but when there are different, and often at times unrelated data, they are not that useful to tell a story. Instead, we boiled down the raw data to just key facts and figures which were easier to represent with iconography and symbols. Keeping in mind that this was going to be a graphic to introduce people to UNISDR’s work, it had to be simple and minimalist.
The one thing I tried to do is to have a large optic that can draw people into the infographic and details. Since I had pretty free creative direction, I wanted to visualize the “DRR” concept. One of the typical symbols I use to represent disasters is the OCHA humanitarian symbol set (the 2012 version was released on the Noun Project). Since DRR isn’t focus on disasters, but more on how development actually has a impact on our risks to disasters, the idea was to put ‘disasters’ in context – meaning that disasters don’t happen in isolation, but a lot of things come into play that creates a disaster. For example, when a earthquake hits, it’s not the earthquake that kills people, but the fact that buildings collapse, fires start, etc. It’s a risk that we face and have a responsibility for everyday. So this context of risk was what I wanted to visualize. And since gambling and probability is typically represented by dice, it just clicked. What do you think?
The infographic was developed as a stand alone poster (download it here) – and parts of it was incorporated into the UNISDR annual report (download it here).