Sustainable gardening / The Home Depot

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C A S E S T U D Y

Sustainable spring gardening

The Home Depot

Collaborating with the creative team at Edelman, we designed an illustrated infographic for The Home Depot to teach customers simple ways on how to care for a garden sustainably.

⒈ Thumbnails

The brief required an illustration that showed how the various areas of a garden be made sustainable. Initially the brief suggested three sustainability points but it was later expanded to six. Though the client was after a straight forward overview of a garden, I tried a variety of approaches and angles to make the piece more dynamic. From looking from inside out, to poking the viewers nose over the fence, I explored a variety of compositions that didn’t make the final cut.

⒉ Roughs

The three sketches below were presented to the client at roughs stage. It was important we selected a composition that could work on a white background and could function more as a vignette rather than an illustration constrained by a frame. A favourite of mine was viewing the garden through a three panel porch door so each panel could display a different zone to highlight. This wasnʼt the idea that went ahead but worked in our favour later down the line when we increased the number of areas in the garden.

⒊ Colour rough

I wanted to communicate the feeling of a warm garden but at the same time I had to intentionally make it look like it could be sunrise or sunset for it to work with the copy: ‘If you need to water with a sprinkler or hose, do so in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is less intense.’ By adding patches of shade across the garden, it made the point more prominent and also broke the composition up at the same time.

⒋ Tighter sketches

I wasnʼt particularly fond of the original garden layouts proposed in my roughs so reconsidered the composition. I looked to design a garden which was both believable as a functional space and compositionally appealing. By moving the greenhouse into the corner, incorporating the water butt and shuffling some other elements around, the overall look of garden felt more natural and well balanced.