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Video created in collaboration with Luma Creative
Seacliff Resilience
Date:
January 2023 - Present
Client:
Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks
Audience:
Residents of Aptos, CA and the greater Santa Cruz Area
The state beaches of Santa Cruz are especially susceptible to natural disasters and extreme weather patterns due to climate change. The historic storms that struck the Santa Cruz area in the winter of 2022-2023 as a result of these extreme weather patterns heavily damaged Seacliff State Beach, spurring an ongoing campaign to clean up the damage and plan for the future of the beach.
This campaign started with a program known as the "Seacliff Recovery Fund," to collect donations and assure the public of the ongoing efforts to address the catastrophic damage. To address this need, my team and I embarked on the first step: creating a recognizable and fitting brand. Throughout this campaign, my team included two of my coworkers and key members of our client team on copywriting and me as the primary designer.
I referenced the unique official State Beach artwork by Michael Schwab for the colors and silhouette of the S.S. Palo Alto, along with a reference photo of the ship before the storms. I wanted an icon that would immediately be recognizable to regular visitors of the Beach, inspiring them to support the place and landmarks they love.
Following the generation of this brand, our team immediately sprung into action, iterating on the look and feel to create print signage, flyers, and ultimately interactive materials for use during a cleanup event a month after the storms, all using the same colors, fonts and expanding into illustrated creatures that find their home at this beach.
As donations continued over the following year, Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks began the "planning for the future" phase of the campaign in the Fall of 2024. This included evolving the "Seacliff Recovery Fund" to "Seacliff Resilience" with a new brand guide and logo.
The new brand represents the natural evolution of the "Seacliff Recovery Fund" logo. I removed the S.S. Palo Alto, creating a more timeless look into the future of the beach as the shipwreck continues to degrade and sink into the waves over time. Thick outlines give an illustrated feel while the same colors are inherited from the source Schwab image.
Seacliff Resilience was created to facilitate community workshops, surveys, and other planning events to help structure the rebuilding of beach facilities in conjunction with the community. To help connect with the public, my team and I generated an informational website, SeacliffResilience.org and flyers for each workshop and survey, referencing the newly established brand guide for the look and feel while incorporating real-life images to the website that we could keep current as beach features change.
The work on this first part of the campaign culminated in a video created to describe the challenges the beach is facing and the importance of collecting community input as the future of the State Beach is decided.
The community feedback, studies and meetings facilitated through the previous phase of this project gave way to the next phase: implementing a recovery plan.
The recovery efforts moving forward include testing different sand dune formations along portions of Seacliff State Beach. While it may not seem like it, sand dune construction is more complicated than first meets the eye!
In order to facilitate community understanding of the plan moving forward, I got to work illustrating simplified versions of each sand dune diagram and creating an instructional animation. These steps were vital for communicating the scientific findings of the beach to a broad audience.
As production began on these more science-heavy products, implementing more sketches and mockups throughout my design process was very important to ensure my own comprehension and that the design decisions I was making were as optimized and easy to understand as they could be.
