In the face of unparalleled global health risks stemming from climate change, researchers at University College London (UCL) are driving efforts to create evidence-based policies to protect public health while confronting the challenges of a changing climate.
Their primary challenge: Condensing extensive roundtables, workshops, and a wealth of content and findings into an easily accessible summary to drive action and generate some buzz around their research.
Working with the UCL team, we created an infographic to highlight the key findings, priorities and actionable opportunities from their research. This visual summary acts as a ‘teaser’ for the research, making it accessible and easily digestible for both the research community and policy makers at local and regional levels.
“We wanted a way of taking a topic that is complex and quite dry, and packaging it to be much more engaging and immediately graspable for our audience.”
Liz Almond, Head of Research Communications and Events, UCL
Liz Almond, Head of Research Communications and Events at UCL, says, “We wanted a way of taking a topic that is complex and quite dry, and packaging it to be much more engaging and immediately graspable for our audience - and we felt an illustrative approach would be the right way to do that.”
“We really like the approach the team took - it feels refreshingly original and conveys the intended themes without resorting to these clichés.”
Liz adds, “When working on projects that are focused on local government and climate, there is a set of visual clichés that can be tricky to avoid. With the infographic, we really like the approach the team took - it feels refreshingly original and conveys the intended themes without resorting to these clichés.”
For the UCL team, it was key the image conveyed a feeling of optimism, with a focus on the interventions and actions that can be taken. By incorporating a transition of colour and imagery of a flowering plant into the illustration, we helped to achieve this.
“The infographic has given us a really neat output from the project - without spending a vast amount of time on it - to help push this project forward,” says Liz.
The infographic has been used internally to prompt discussions, and externally to report
back to stakeholders and funders, providing a visual overview of the project. It has been shared across social channels and featured on UCL’s site to raise awareness of the work.
Liz adds. “The whole project went off really well and we’re very happy with the end result.”