Connected.
Visual Media Alliance.
How do you communicate the urgency of a circular economy in print through a single magazine cover — in a way that feels bold and unmistakably print?
How do you communicate the urgency of a circular economy in print through a single magazine cover — in a way that feels bold and unmistakably print?
Visual Media Alliance is a non-profit supporting printers, design agencies, and small business owners across the industry. Their quarterly publication, Connected, goes out to their entire member network, they wanted a cover that aligned with Earth Day's theme: Sustainable Print & the Planet.
The brief was to design a cover that promoted awareness of the circular economy — specifically how the print industry sits within it. Educational enough to mean something. Striking enough to be picked up.
Sustainable Print & the Planet: Embracing the Circular Economy.
— VMA Connected, Spring 2025 brief
The palette was built around tension: the warmth of orange against the urgency of green. Neither color could exist without the other, orange without green reads as energy; green without orange reads as nature. Together they read as action.
Silver was added as a neutral to represent the industrial and mechanical side of print production.
The cover has four distinct visual zones that each carry a part of the story. The masthead positions the publication; the illustration carries the concept; the arc delivers the message; the contents bar grounds the reader in the issue.
