Nick Franklin

Having gone back to the beginning of my project, I've re-read the baseline report of the CoML and picked up on something that I missed first time round. Basically, in order to help the researchers focus on specific areas of the oceans to research, the oceans have been divided up into six areas based on the difficulty and the technology required to explore them.

"... we choose realms of the human edges, hidden boundaries, light and dark central waters, active geology, ice, and the microscopic."

Within each of these 'realms' the scientists go on to examine what is known, unknown and unknowable. I'm pretty devastated that I didn't pick up on this earlier as it could provide me with the perfect material to illustrate. One illustration for each realm, packaged into a nice booklet to be sold as a commemorative object next year when the findings of the census are published? Or made into posters for an exhibition to do wih the census? Or just an art book/posters for people who have an interest in both design and science?
Anyway, here's a couple of attempts at 'The Human Edges' - the first;


and the most recent;


The human edges are essentially the coastlines of the worlds seas and oceans, and the factors affecting this realm are pretty much all human. From the abundance of readily available food that first drew humans to the coast, to the fact that by 2020 two-thirds of all humans are predicted to live within 50km of the sea and our pollution entering the seas affects which species are able to live near the shore, we have always had a huge affect on our coastlines and I've tried to reflect this in this illustration. Without an explanation it's quite hard to tell what the image is saying but I like that - it is supposed to be abstract after all. I like the flow to the second one, but it's just elements put together on a page, and it's not really saying anything to me or jumping out at me as something I really like.