Bath Uni Brief - Chemicals

We were recently given the opportunity to work with Bath University on a number of live projects that aim to raise awareness of the important research carried out by the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies. In particular, there were two briefs that I found very interesting. The first one was about trying to change the public perception of the word "chemicals", as it invariably has very negative connotations.

I immediately thought about the word itself and the fact that actually everything is made of the same basic chemicals - they are not always synthesised in a laboratory. So I got to thinking about things that people instantly associate with being the opposite of man-made or artificial, things like apples, water, fluffy yellow chicks, flowers, etc. I think this idea has legs, now just for the tricky part of representing it in a graphical way.

I figured the apple would be a good starting point, so I bought a lovely specimen and headed down to the photography studio. It was at this point that I contacted the boffins at Bath Uni to get an idea of the actual chemical composition of your average apple. Here's the first poster idea that I came up with:

Okay, so the brown leaf on the apple looks a bit ugly but at this stage I just want to test the concept and see what the Bath Uni lot think about it. I can reshoot a more perfect specimen at some point in the future.

I then got the idea of running the posters in pairs, both identical apart from one says "100% Natural" and the other "100% Chemical".

I imagine these posters on bus stops all over town, so I have mocked up a few examples of how they would look in situ:

I don't think that the poster design is by any means final, I just wanted to test the concept and get approval before taking the project forward.