City of Melbourne
Project type: Graphics Design, Project Management, Film, Research
Role: Graphic Designer, Project Manager, Project Officer
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite
Fusing together my background in Graphic Design and Urban Horticulture, I completed several projects for the City of Melbourne Urban Sustainability department, including managing the production of a green wall construction film, and creating content, infographics, and research work for the Urban Forest research project.
Loop Bar Green Wall Film
I worked as a project manager on the Loop Bar Green wall film, which documented the green wall build in an engaging, stop motion format.
This project involved liaising with the filmographers, green wall designers, construction workers, and City of Melbourne council staff to make sure the filming could be completed around a complicated, multi-day and permit-based construction schedule.
After filming was completing, I worked with the filmographers to produce a final edit.
Urban Forestry Infographics
I created a large selection of infographics and collateral for several projects within the Urban Forestry and Ecology team to enhance publications presentations, and produced education materials for use internally and on the public-facing City of Melbourne website.
Peter May Planting Guide
The Tree Planting Guide is based on the the guidance of reknowned Victorian arborist Peter May.
The report included statistics, charts, and graphic planting guides, to be used as an internal resource for arborists.
Urban Forest Research
Melbourne has one of the most documented urban forests in the world, with every one of its 70,000 urban trees in the council area recorded, identified, analysed for its age and health, and valued for its ecological (and therefore monetary) value in cooling the city down.
The Urban Forest Visual and corresponding database, was originally publicised to display the urban forest and allow the public to help report council arborist work needed on individual trees, allowing people click a button to “Email this tree”.
Surprisingly (and charmingly), this button instead became a receptacle of poems, letters, and school projects, all dedicated to celebrating the love of these community trees. Melburnians would email trees that the saw on their daily walks and adventures, or ones that they lived nearby to express gratitude, simple thoughts, or sadness about the trees’ illness. The project even received emails from overseas residents and students who were just fascinated by the project.
In additional to my design work, I worked as a project officer for the Urban Forest Research project during one of the peaks of interest in the Urban Forest Visual, and was given the task of collating and redacting the personal information from over 3000 of these tree emails to be used for future sociological research and to create a news article for the ABC.
This database happily still continues, and emails continue to be collected, as described in this additional ABC article.
“Dear Mr Elm 1033609,
I am your biggest fan. Every day I walk by you and admire your leaves. This map calls you “semi-mature". That’s how I feel sometimes. When I was sad last week I sat under your canopy and felt a bit better. Thanks for that.
I hope you never get cut down.
Sincerely,
Your secret admirer xx
