A science background made shooting the BRANZ Annual Review an interesting undertaking. Meeting and capturing the work of many of our top building and materials scientists dealing with applied real world issues in the building industry was fascinating, and working alongside an experienced and capable team of in house designers, writers and publishers was satisfying. The final report we crafted has just been released here.
Below are a few example pages and a brief explanation of the design and photographic themes involved…
The sections were based around light based themes, ‘lighting the way’, ‘laser-focused research’, ‘bright spots’, ‘full spectrum’ and ‘illuminating the path’. So it was appropriate that we settled on dark themed cover and section heads, adding light in as appropriate to the theme. This also ties to the cover image above, representing the dark lightless landscape, with city scale built environment behind a rudimentary personal shelter, the basis of all building we need. This dark theme leads on through the document.
Here are two of them, the bottom green one captures a study using lasers to understand house ventilation better.
Illustration of real world issues and problems like ventilation and condensation often had very literal images, but that approach does not really add to the story. For instance, school ventilation is a vital issue for Covid management and an issue investigated by BRANZ, so rather than basic photos of open windows we created much nicer to real world scenarios showing opening windows being used, such as this:
Illustrating concepts of ventilation, good practice, lung health and research
BRANZ supporting science literacy in schools.
Mental health and suicide prevention is an identified risk in the construction industry, and is now getting better attention.