BirdLife’s annual Save Our Seabirds Festival hosts the Oceans of Life Photographic Exhibition at the Iziko Museum. Our client, BirdLife, had a strong presence at this exhibition, which required a great deal of promotional literature. They requested we produce posters to go on display at their stand, which would be visited by people attending the week-long photographic exhibition.

These posters needed to create awareness for BirdLife's Save Our Seabirds Festival by highlighting the threats our seabirds face.

As the posters were being displayed at a photographic exhibition we felt it important to find a visual solution that avoided the use of photographic images.

With this challenge in mind we needed to find a strong and simple graphic to highlight the threats seabirds face (the key objective of the Save Our Seabirds Festival).

As BirdLife is an NGO, it was important to create posters that did not fall into the clutter of this industry.

The striking visual of each poster encouraged people attending the photographic exhibition to visit the BirdLife stand. This in turn allowed the visitors to engage with BirdLife and find out more about the Save Our Seabirds Festival. Through this active engagement visitors signed up to attend the Save Our Seabirds Festival lecture series which was oversubscribed by 400% compared to the previous year.

Communication is often emotional with little factual & rational support. Through research we established that the 3 main threats faced by seabirds are overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction.

On a very limited budget we decided to communicate these facts with a campaign of strong & simple graphic images & carefully chosen words.

Each poster addressed 1 key threat faced by seabirds while keeping in line with the overall look of the poster campaign.We decide to produce the posters at an A0 size (1189 x 841 mm/46.8 x 33.1 in) in order to emphasise the striking visuals.