Habitats for Honey Bees
Designers are constantly encouraged to find a style or a concept that drives them. Up until this project (that I did in February 2024) I did not have one. This project has opened my eyes to the world of conservation and the role of graphic design in advocacy. It has also led me to a lab research position where I will be working with bees to save them from climate change, while also designing infographics for the lab’s head researcher.
This project started because I had recently seen hexagon patterns and became fascinated with them. When assigned a project that entailed making a magazine for a United Nations Sustainability Development Goal, I thought of the hexagon and landed on the SDG: life on land, with a focus on bee life and pollinator health.
A huge component of this project was research, this project was unique though because the research was not just focused on learning about audiences or speaking with clients. This project forced you to research and look outside of the studio to combine graphic design efforts with sustainability, in turn using graphic design for advocacy. A great connection between art and science was fostered.
This project had an insane amount of ups and downs, but one key takeaway was to continue updates; nothing is ever truly done. In the studio course (in which this project was assigned) we have lectures in tandem with in-class studio work and critique. This means we are constantly developing new skills to push our project forward, this meant I was never truly done a spread. I was constantly updating the project with every new skill or piece of feedback. If I had settled, I would not have had a consistent magazine and the final product would not be a culmination of me using all of my tools in my tool kit. A little detail such as a drop cap, made the piece what it is today, but I could have decided to settle and skip over it.
Another key takeaway was test printing. There were so many components to this project. If I had waited to print until the end I would have missed minor mistakes and pages would not have lined up properly. At one point I had a tri-fold page that was completely in the wrong spot and mathematically did not align. I only found this out with a test print. I had more reprints than I can count, which I learned helped me to revise, edit, and find the tiny issues. This is a concept I have used on every project since.
After a wave of inspiration and a newfound creative drive, I decided to take it further. I incorporated die cuts, textures, and the most important feature; a bee hive. The packaging of the magazine is a fully functional hand-made bee hive that can be placed outside to encourage bees to move into your garden or yard which helps save the bees and encourages ecosystems to flourish. One of the strongest parts of this project was its applicability and well-roundedness. A singular magazine would have solved the design problem, but the packaging tied everything together. This demonstrates the principle; that something is only as good as the sum of its parts, which is what I learned in the first project of the semester.
Project requirements: Build a 24-page magazine based on a UN SDG, the magazine must incorporate different textures, an unconventional binding, and a functional package.
The process
After picking a theme and vibe I had to plan my execution. Before this project, I had never worked with patterns, so I wanted to push myself and incorporate them. The original design had a flat and dimensionless grid of hexagons. However, it seemed to suck up the text and dull the spreads. After a critique, I came up with new ways of bringing life to the hexagons, so I played with layering, gradients, and making the shapes look 3D with angles. Ultimately I combined layering to give the effect of a gradient.
2. After creating the magazine I needed to plan out my packaging. This portion would not have been possible without field research. I traveled to a local Lowes to gather information about man-made pollinator homes, to see if it would be possible to accurately replicate it in the packaging.
3. Then I brought everything to my big class critique. Giving and getting critique is always initially rough, you bring something you are so proud of to the group thinking it is the best it can be. Ultimately, critique is where the design is pushed that extra mile and after making the changes, you can not imagine the design without the corrections. This is a look into some of my notes from a final critique, it may seem confusing but there is a method to the madness. Critique, to me, is all about absorbing as much feedback as possible in the short amount of time you are presenting. I was advised to alter my folios and create variety in scale.
4. Finally it was time to construct the magazine. A large portion of this project was handcrafting the magazine itself, all 24 pages. This video shows the magazine with all of its die-cuts before it was later bound together with gold and burlap twine.
5. This was the result, all together. A magazine in a functional hive package, with extra hive pieces that instruct the user on how to make their own bee hive.
