VisualGPS Creative Trends Sustainability Keeping It Real: Sustainability through Visual Metaphors

Sustainability is complex, especially at the corporate level. As a result, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals outline 17 areas under which business leaders can feel empowered to begin making progress and reduce emissions by 2030.¹ Given the breadth of all these goals and the myriad pathways they offer business leaders to sustainability, visualizing them literally can become quite cumbersome. But it doesn’t have to be so. 

VisualGPS research has found that consumers report a visual appetite for the present: 75% feel that visuals depicting how the environment is changing as a result of climate change are influential, emphasizing how important it is for visuals to reflect the world we currently live in. But how these realities are visualized matters, too. When asked what types of images they find best represent sustainability and why, consumers give “creative” and that they “look like something they’d see on social media” as reasons. This sentiment is reinforced when asked to rank images that best represent sustainability. The visuals that people find most representative provide crucial insight into what steps brands can take to better depict sustainability in their visual choices: They are all rooted in realism, to varying degrees, but all attempt to make a creative, metaphorical statement about our collective relationship to the environment. The imagery below visualize these elements that tested well among consumers.

Using the elements of an image to make a broader statement about sustainability is a way to make an impact with sustainable visuals. And conceptual imagery has emerged as a conduit for those types of visual metaphors. Over the last 10 years, there has been a 340% increase in the presence of conceptual imagery revolving around environmental conservation. However, a large portion of these visuals (43%) tend to use symbols like plants or the color green. These elements hinder progress: Image testing also reveals that visuals with less metaphorical and more literal elements (like reusable straws, or recycling) are least representative of sustainability.

Taking advantage of this visual opportunity and choosing sustainability visuals that evoke strong metaphors is a two‑step approach. The first step requires asking what are the fundamental topics/resources/objects important to a sustainable future as it related to your business? Examples of these topics can be found in the importance of the energy transition or the accessibility of circularity through acts like buying secondhand.² Then try to find visuals that take those concepts, or things related to them, and visualize them as creatively as possible: Through the use of visual metaphors like merging nature with circular shapes to emphasize the importance of circularity, through using movement in video to convey something complex like the adaptability of a natural resource like wood, or simply through engaging and intriguing composition like the aerial view of a solar plant.

These steps will ensure the sustainability visuals you choose are rooted in what's important right now, are visually enticing, evolve beyond the established sustainability tropes, and are reflective of the steps we are all taking to offset the effects of climate change.

Sources

[1] United Nations
[2] BBC