The proposed expressway project was criticized as a haphazard building project thinly veiled as legitimate social development. The planned route would destroy rare natural landscapes, create houses in the wrong areas, and encourage car dependancy. Crucially, the entire project was created without consulting the public.
I was commissioned to create illustrations for the each of the key arguments against building an Oxford-Cambridge Expressway. These illustrations would then feature on banners used at events. For this reason the images needed to be clear, concise, and legible at a distance.
The decision was made to take a 'positive' approach to this point. After exploring more condemnatory ideas it became clear that 'car dependency' was a fairly complicated idea to convey and that focusing on alternative transport made for a better banner.
Following the design goals of this project I kept the faces for this illustration incredibly simple. Anything more complicated became difficult to interpret a distance.
This illustration clearly conveys the idea of damaging the environment whilst also painting the natural world as fragile. This highlights the need to take care of it which emphasises the fact that this Expressway does exactly the opposite.
This image conveys the idea of building houses in the wrong places in a manner that is very easy to understand. I feel that this is a potentially difficult concept to convey succinctly but the illustration works well.
Here are the images in situ on the banners.
It is worth noting that the campaign was successful, the expressway was officially cancelled on the 18th March 2021.
