Illustrations for Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2020
Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2020 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.
Just like previous years, Lucy's commentary is straight-shooting, insightful and prescient. This is the third year that I've done the illustrations for Blueprint, to help bring those ideas to life on each page.
More and more people are working out the collective power they can have in influencing businesses and governments, in new ways
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. Many of the concepts are familiar to us all (social media, surveillance, privacy, funding), but Lucy takes these concepts much further, which makes illustrating them pretty tricky.
To help readers understand these (often more esoteric) concepts, I established a loose visual language of multicultural figures manipulating giant objects (e.g. magnifying glass, coins, photos), combining realistic depiction with symbolic and metaphorical depiction (e.g. big eyes for surveillance).
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 tried different colour schemes, but ended up going with the colour scheme from last year; I think it still works well, and the client still liked it. The desaturated cool blues and violets bring out the richness of that red, which I always used for emphasis in any of the illustrations.
I used the cultural reference of the photo of US troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima, to show how we can collectively rewrite the laws governing digital security and equity together.
Privacy is a right, and surveillance should just be accepted as part of the game to 'keep us safe'.
This one's my favourite. Who would ever have thought that we would now have non-profit organisations that sweep the internet and highlight disinformation and fake news? It's unbelievable we would even need that... yet here we are.
More and more of the things we use are watching us, listening to us, and storing what they pick up on private servers away from our access.
This lettering was fun to do!
