A Little More Love for NYC's Green Spaces.
Description
Love in Green is a public awareness campaign designed to celebrate New York City's parks and green spaces. Through custom typography, botanical iconography, and playful messaging, the campaign encourages New Yorkers to reconnect with nature and keep their city green.
Follow the creative journey of Love in Green. From the early research and brainstorming, to final execution.
Love in Green is a public awareness campaign designed to celebrate New York City's parks and green spaces. Through custom typography, botanical iconography, and playful messaging, the campaign encourages New Yorkers to reconnect with nature and take an active role in keeping their city green, vibrant, and thriving.
The creative direction was established early on, drawing inspiration from New York City's visual heritage, particularly its iconic subway signage and the work of Milton Glaser. The name Love in Green is a direct nod to Glaser's famous I ♥ NY design, offering a subtle celebration of the city's graphic design history.
Flowers became a central part of the visual identity following visits to Central Park and Prospect Park. While trees are the most recognizable symbols of urban greenery, flowers offered a less obvious and more personal way to connect people with their parks. Their variety of shapes and forms provided the foundation for a distinctive iconographic system, while also creating opportunities for visitors to identify and discover the flowers growing around them. This approach turned the icons into more than decorative elements, encouraging curiosity, exploration, and a greater appreciation for the city's green spaces.
The campaign was also designed to extend beyond traditional posters, signage, and social media. Additional applications included an interactive flower identification experience within the parks, alongside playful merchandise such as seed packets, encouraging New Yorkers to bring a little greenery into their own homes.
Five flowers were selected to form the foundation of the campaign's iconographic system. Each icon was designed using a consistent 9 × 9 grid, simplifying the flowers' natural shapes into recognizable geometric forms while maintaining a cohesive visual language. The grid also helps establish a balance between consistency and individuality, allowing each flower to retain its distinctive characteristics.
Beyond their role as the primary decorative elements of the identity, the icons also serve a practical purpose. They are incorporated into the campaign's wayfinding and flower identification experiences, helping visitors recognize and discover different flowers throughout the parks. This dual purpose allows the iconography to bring personality to the campaign while encouraging curiosity and engagement with the surrounding environment.
Petalo is a custom decorative typeface developed to give Love in Green a distinctive and recognizable voice. Inspired by Baby Teeth, a typeface created by iconic New York designer Milton Glaser, Petalo embraces playful, unconventional letterforms that bring a warm, lighthearted personality to the campaign. Subtle heart shapes incorporated into some of its letters reinforce the theme of love, giving the typeface a charming and approachable character.
Constructed using the same 9 × 9 grid as the flower icons, Petalo shares their geometric shapes and forms, creating a cohesive visual language across the campaign. Its primary role is to capture attention rather than provide immediate legibility, with user testing helping to evaluate its readability. More conventional typography supports longer text and essential information, allowing Petalo to remain expressive without compromising the campaign's clarity.
The campaign's color palette combines soft pastel greens and pinks, reflecting the two central themes of Love in Green: nature and affection. Green evokes the city's parks and plant life, while pink introduces a sense of warmth, care, and playfulness. Together, these colors create a fresh and inviting visual identity that reinforces the campaign's optimistic message and approachable personality.
The earliest iterations of the campaign already featured the flower iconography system, which served as the foundation for the visual identity. At this stage, the color palette and typography were still being explored, with different combinations tested to find a direction that complemented the icons. These initial experiments helped establish the campaign's overall visual character and laid the groundwork for a more cohesive and recognizable identity.
