UN Sustainable Development Goals
Intro
In 2015, the United Nations introduced the Sustainable Development Goals; 17 global priorities aimed at ensuring peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Despite their urgency, these goals are often perceived as abstract and distant from everyday experience. I created a series of A5 postcards that translate each goal into a tangible visual message through semantic typography, making their meaning more immediate and emotionally resonant.
Deliverables:
Editorial
Postcard
Year
/
2025
Positioning
The UN operates as a global institution whose visual identity prioritises neutrality, authority, and universality across cultures and languages. Any promotional extension of its messaging must respect this institutional tone while introducing enough visual distinctiveness to compete for attention in a saturated media landscape. The postcards are positioned as an accessible bridge between the UN's formal communication and everyday audiences — printed objects that retain the seriousness of the cause while functioning as cultural artefacts people might keep, share, or display. They sit deliberately between activism and design collectible: serious enough to be credible, expressive enough to be remembered.
Visual Language
I set myself a deliberate constraint: building the entire visual system from only three tools — colour, semantics, and distortion. This restriction shaped a language that is neutral and universal enough to align with the UN's institutional voice, while remaining graphically distinctive. Colour palettes were derived directly from the official colours assigned to each of the five chosen Goals, anchoring the series in the UN's existing system. Semantic imagery translates each Goal's core idea into a single, immediately legible visual metaphor, and distortion introduces tension — a visual disruption that mirrors the urgency of the issues themselves. Together, these three tools form a compact, repeatable framework that scales across the series while keeping each postcard recognisable on its own.
