Beautiful Trouble – Designed for Rebellion

In collaboration with Sina Kamala Kaufmann, Michael Timmermann, Annemarie Botzki, Ulrike Bischoff and the team at S. Fischer-Verlag, I had the opportunity to create a handbook on rebellion. Extinction Rebellion uses means of civil disobedience to campaign for a turnaround in climate policy, while developing a self-image as a radically alarmist movement.
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For the handbook, I managed a team of illustrators and created some of the illustrations myself, as well as doing the typesetting and layout of the handbook.
Of particular interest was the development of illustrations for hand signs in the plenary culture of activist organizations, which are gradually becoming a standard sign system across countries.

A distinctive feature of the Extinction Rebellion climate movement is its strong visual brand consistency, which I was very interested in from the beginning and have been actively involved in since 2018. Therefore, for the German edition of the book, I have also attempted to adopt and consistently present the wood print style influenced by the XR Art & Design DIY workshops in Bristol.

To add analog warmth and grain to the digital image, I printed the image on textured paper and scanned it back in. Based on the scans, I retraced the image with a vector software and created brush presets from individual image areas for further digital illustrations.

Contents of the handbook have been marked with icons and assigned to the sections: Action, Community, and Legal Issues. Together with the author Sina Kamala Kaufmann we structured the content and scripted additional illustrations, that we wanted to have in the book. I researched illustrators on various social media platforms, got in touch with them and planned their work and illustrations. After a review process and some adjustments to fit the layout, the illustrations were finally released with the book.

The book “Wann, wenn nicht wir*” entered the Spiegel Best Seller List Top 10.