National Geographic x tentree Collaboration

Intro

“The trees are taking center stage (as they usually do here at tentree) with our new limited- edition collection in collaboration with National Geographic. This collection serves as a simple but powerful reminder that when we plant trees, we protect our planet, and in turn each other. Trees literally give us the air we breathe, along with just about everything else we need to survive, and our future pretty much depends on them.

The limited-edition graphics you see featured in the National Geographic x tentree collection pay homage to some of the world’s most magnificent trees. Every design was drawn by hand and inspired by iconic photography sourced from the National Geographic archives. We caught up with our Graphic Designer Lisa to learn how she and the team brought this campaign to life.”

- Hannah Prince on the Environmentor Blog

Design work

Throughout this project I was the Design Liason between tentree’s Product team and Marketing team for a collaboration with National Geographics. After art direction from marketing, I presented decks to the National Geographic Disney team and took part in stakeholder meeitngs. I worked on the collections line architecture with merchandising, the fabric and print colouring, the hand drawn artwork illustrations, artpack creation, and sample approval for the collection.

Process

Our team was really inspired by the vintage National Geographic covers from the late 1800s and early 1900s. They feature hand-drawn inking styles and ink woodblock artwork which this period is really well known for. You can see the style I’m talking about in the archive photo of the Redwood below.

The National Geographic team offered us a huge library of archived photos to choose from. With so many gorgeous pictures, from close-up photos of leaves to widescale landscapes, it was a pretty hard decision. To start, everyone working on the project chose their top five picks, and then from there, we narrowed down the selections together. We took a democratic approach taking into consideration all the different locations, silhouettes, and shapes available to us. In the end, we chose five images. Four of these images we re-illustrated and the last image we left as it was originally printed.

Of the four images we re-illustrated, the trees come from all over the world. They include tall and short baobabs from Madagascar, an acacia tree from Tanzania, a dragon’s blood tree from Yemen, and redwood trees found in California. Below you can see that the left is the original photo from the National Geographic archives, and the right is a scanned version of the inked drawings I drew.