Illustrations for Stanford Blueprint 2019 publication

Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2019 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, and those that pull the strings and have the keys to the gates.

This is the second year that I've done the illustrations for Blueprint, to help bring those ideas alive on each page.

It's too easy for the private sector to feed off the social wealth of community and data

Concepts and early sketches

As I read through the initial draft, I'd make loose sketches of whatever came to mind, to explain and amplify the various concepts and ideas. After that, I did several rounds of sketching for discussion with the project team. A lot of Lucy's ideas used nouns and subjects that were fairly familiar to people (such as credit cards, online payments, Facebook, crowdfunding, and so on), but were used to discuss more complex implications and situations that would get pretty esoteric.

To help readers understand the (often quite esoteric) ideas they were reading about, I established a loose visual language of abstracted figures often floating in clouds (riffing off the idea of 'data in the cloud' and so on). Objects are often quite symbolic and metaphorical (e.g. big eyes rather than video cameras).

Visual tone and colour

Stanford's brand includes a very assertive red, and the look and feel of Blueprint has always harmonised with that in different ways, year after year. I chose a colour palette of desaturated blues and violets to bring out the richness of that red, whenever it featured in any of the illustrations.

There's a lot of online giving by using other people's platforms (like Facebook). Our data lives on their servers, and is a massive asset that we don't have access to.

Every transaction on every device you make -- whether it's buying online or giving online -- is tracked, stored, and analysed by others in ways you don't know about,

There are three ways of giving: your money, your time, and your data

More change needs to happen, where our data is freed up to be a commonly accessible resource, for us to use responsibly, not just the companies who run the platforms.