Illustrations for Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2022
Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2022 is an annual industry forecast by Lucy Bernholz (senior research scholar at Stanford PACS and Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab) about the ways we use private resources for public benefit in the digital age. Each year, it includes provocative ideas about the intersections of technology, privacy, philanthropy, as well as what the shady not-so-public parts of the system get up to, like surveillance capitalism and how corporations launder political party donations through nonprofit organisations.
This is the fifth year that I've done the illustrations for Blueprint, to help bring those ideas to life on each page. This was also the second Blueprint after another year of the pandemic, so there was still a lot to say about how COVID-19 has exposed the most brittle, fragile parts of the systems that most of us are blissfully ignorant about, take for granted, and yet rely on every day.
Here are some of the illustrations. Download the full publication as a PDF here.
All of the illustrations in this year's Blueprint worked together to tell their own narrative of seeking and reaching a threshold, despite turmoil
Concepts and early sketches
This year's Blueprint was an even bigger cri de coeur and call to action than last year's. Plus, there was a really strong overall theme of being at a threshold of great change. There are so many people, and so many different organisations and parts of our systems that want big change, but are really only just making tiny changes around the edges of the big systemic problems. Plus, there is even more complexity, conflict, and obfuscation going on these days, even to the point where there are some big orgs 'patching up' the holes in our systems that other orgs are making... all at the same time.
Given that this was my fifth year of doing illustrations for Blueprint, there were a lot of topics and themes that I'd drawn before. I was looking for another way to bring the text to life, other than just picking and illustrating specific topics throughout the text. So instead, I thought about having a set of images that would tell their own meta-story... a broader, simpler narrative over the top of the topics in the text, yet still very much related.
I came up with a visual language of windows and snaky ribbony threads, trying to show how we're guided (whether we realise or not) in and out of all these systems and circumstances. I also used a repeating motif of a round portal, which represents that threshold, that moment where we have to take a big leap into the unknown, to make the big changes we know we have to take, if only we have the courage.
Visual tone and colour
In previous issues of Blueprint, I'd used the Stanford cardinal red plus a few other tints. In the last one (Blueprint 2021), I opted for only one desaturated green tint, which went well with a rougher black-and-white treatment. The team weren't a big fan of using lots of red, and I knew I wanted to bring in some colour into the portal symbol, to represent some optimism. So, this year, I used a variety of colours for the windows, the threads, the figures, and the portal.
The portal was a repeating element that I wanted to keep abstract, yet have plenty of life and vigour of its own
This illustration represents the systems and communities sharing time and resources with each other, while the portal 'looks on', waiting
This illustration represents people helping each other find a way to the portal. The portal got bigger in each image throughout.
In the final illustration, we see figures being helped into the portal, and disappearing to whatever waits on the other side...
