Turning the Page

These icons were designed for a contest for the BIEC, who are developing a system of standards for green publishing. Basically they are creating a system like the LEED certification of the architecture world for the publishing world. For the icon itself I went for a more geometric feel than what is often seen with these types of symbols, often times they employ imagery that looks a little more like the olive branches of film festivals, that sort of thing. My little reflected leafs could be seen as having the same relationship as two pages of an open book, but really it's mostly a straightforward approach meant to be attractive, easy to reproduce, work in any color and read small.

One of the challenges of this project was the fact that along with logos they wanted a naming system for their three levels of greenness. They are against using "silver, gold and platinum", and needed something else. I went with the the simplest thing I could think of, that being class A class B and class C. After all, with examples like "level 1 2 and 3, or tier 1 2 and 3, I feel it's never clear which end of the spectrum is the best, Level 1 or level 3? Which tier is on top, 1 or 3? I'm also not a fan of made up systems that need explanation, I could have suggested something like "Forest level, grass level, and seafoam level" (dark green to light green) but nobody would know what the hell that meant. With these naming systems the desire always seems to be to make every level sound good, that's why the silver, gold and platinum of LEED system works well, and in that sense A,B,C isn't perfect 'cause a C-student is only passing. But hey, maybe that would act as an added incentive to at least make it to the "B level".