GRASS ROOTS / TRAIL BLAZED
This project focuses on the impacts of access to green-spaces, specifically in relation to health disparities. I wanted to create a visually-engaging product that created awareness of these impacts in a really digestible way. The end-product is an illustrated story about a girl, Sofia, walking to and from school. On her journey, she notices small details about her neighborhood that tell a larger story about the history and importance of green-spaces.
The story itself is simple, but if you want to learn more, you can read the dense body of information on each page-- they summarize the research I’ve gathered about green-spaces, and they’re correlated to the detail that the main character notices. For example, when she notices that the neighborhood is really hot, the research delves into how redlining in the 60s has caused the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect to disproportionately impact under-resourced urban neighborhoods. There are 11 topics covered throughout the zine.
A fun detail: reading the zine front-to-back versus back-to-front gives you a mirrored story, which is the reasoning behind alternate titles on the front and back covers.