If you haven’t heard about Airplot , Greenpeace have bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the proposed third runway site at Heathrow . The aim of the purchase is to prevent the runway being built.

The government plans to go ahead with the airport expansion even though this means the UK will have “no hope of meeting its climate emission targets” (source: Greenpeace). At full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

Not only do I support the Airplot cause, but I thought this a good opportunity to look at the creation of its logo, designed by Airside, a London-based design agency.

Regardless of scalability issues, I chose to feature the logo because of the process, and I love how Airside go into depth on their blog (showing plenty of sketches).

“As the project continued the idea of using type as a constructive device became the favoured route, however the design team were concerned that the concept of ideographic type would be hard to explain.”

“After culling the directions considered unsuccessful, we approached Greenpeace with the above idea. From our point of view it was important to communicate how fields could be abstracted into an underlying grid. “This point was crucial as it would allow us to use the field metaphor, but through a much more manageable form. To explain this point we presented the 4 sequential images featured in the above presentation to hammer the point home.”

“Acknowledging that land was central to Greenpeace’s protest, Airside created an identity based on the colours and shapes synonymous with the rural fields Airplot seeked to occupy.”

Airside published two logo development blog posts — the first shows how the design is being adapted for different campaign messages, and the second includes logo sketches and cardboard type cutouts. It’s interesting to read the accompanying commentary:

New Work: Greenpeace Presents Airplot

Process: Greenpeace Presents Airplot

Update:

Links removed after Airside closed its doors in 2012.