Step 02
tHE brief
ESA - European Space Agency
Climate office
ESA already creates '"Little Pictures of climate" which tell stories from satellite climate information. Each picture is showcased in the "Little Picture Gallery".
My "Little Picture" has been chosen to be showcased on this gallery because my work is among the top ten entries of the "Little Picture Competition".
All the information about the competition can be found on the ESA website. The aim is to use data from ESA climate office and create an illustration that emulates the "Little Pictures of Climate".
Decades of climate oriented data are available on the ESA website. These data were obtained thanks to satellite surveillance and present insight on several climate concerns such as sea level or ice coverage.
Among the several subjects available, I chose to represent burned area in Europe. This subjects was already represented in several little pictures but I found that even though I liked some of the graphs, the subject was less obvious when compared to the other little pictures.
I also think that it has been one of the most recurrent theme in the media over the summer and this might be a very insightful topic (even if there is no data from 2021 to 2023 yet).
Little pictures of climate that are already presented in the gallery are created in a very simple style (no gradient, simple shapes) and highlight the data that were used for each illustration.
Most subjects are very visual and obvious ; in one second the subject of the illustration can be understood easily.
Data should be the center of the image.
I chose to keep the representation of data as a streamgraph because I think this was a well suited type of graph for burned area. Indeed, it shows clearly areas (with the width of the streams) and it also allows an easy comparison between years (which are presented vertically).
A matchstick is added because it permits to clearly express the link with wildfires, and it also has a strong visual impact.
In this picture, the streamgraph represents the smoke of the matchstick due to its shape and also for its symbolism when linked to one of the sentences of the text below the image : "This shows the loss of many hectares of forests that went up in smoke due to wildfires".
For this illustration, I chose a color palette that reminds heat and fire (reds, orange and yellow). I also added a bit of purple and some very dark blue to compliment these color palette and the smoke is a grey is purple subtones to be visible on the yellow background.
