Brief Explanation

We wanted to remind people that their insatiable desire for paper is one of the foremost causes of deforestation, and thus, animal extinction. To make our message immediate and inescapable, we decided to use the product of deforestation’s medium for the message. You can’t ignore the connection between everyday paper use and animal extinction if their blood is literally on your hands.

The Brief

“46-58 million square miles of forest are lost each year, the equivalent of 36 football fields every minute”. [WWF] Widespread deforestation is not only impacting people’s livelihoods and intensifying global warming, but also threatening to condemn unknown numbers of animal species to extinction. In increasingly industrial China, the destruction of our forests can seem all too distant, so we felt compelled to bring the bloody results of deforestation more immediately into everyday life.

How the final design was conceived

We printed the bloody result of ‘paper cuts’ in the shape of threatened and endangered animals onto paper destined for common office use, into the layouts of magazines, and special promotional flyers that we also tacked up as posters.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

We distributed the packs of paper and magazines to offices throughout Shanghai and also erected an installation in M50, Shanghai’s art district, to give people a closer look at the animals they put in danger everyday through their paper consumption. The exhibition at M50 was an unprecedented success, with record-breaking numbers attending its opening, and the feedback received from offices was in the form of pledges: to reduce paper waste in an attempt to save our furry friends.