The project

When I joined Buro Happold in 2021, the team was halfway through the C40 Clean Construction publications, with Milan, Toronto and Mexico City completed. I worked on the three remaining cities, Ekurhuleni in South Africa (a metropolitan area rather than a single city), Quezon in the Philippines and Qingdao in China. 

My work included creating illustrations of each city’s most recognisable buildings and an InDesign report.

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My work

Besides uni, I hadn’t worked with perspective illustrations before joining Buro Happold. During the interview process I was asked to create an illustration of Battersea Power Station, a project BH proudly worked on. I rather enjoyed working outside my comfort zone, especially when it involved one of my favourite London icons.

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How we did it

For the C40 illustrations, the team used Google Maps (and Baidu Maps for Qingdao) to get the sense and feel of each city. We started by drafting compositions that should demonstrate the uniqueness of each place, always ensuring consistency with the previous output. 

When the final composition and selection of buildings were decided, the team worked finalising the illustrations. My contribution was on several building illustrations designed in Illustrator before sharing with other team members who added the textures and effects in Photoshop.

The practical details

For the InDesign report, I imported the text from Word to InDesign mapping the styles to match the guidelines defined at the start of the project. With all text imported, I worked with paragraph and object styles to lay out the information. The template was well-designed by my colleague so it was easy to maintain consistency. 

One area I used my creativity, layout and hierarchy skills in action was the presentation of the illustration’s assets on several pages. Designed to work as standalones as well as part of the overall illustration, I worked in Photoshop isolating assets that added creativity and flair on the report pages.

Growth and impact

This project challenged me to expand my technical skillset from mastering perspective illustrations to styles in InDesign. Working with mapping tools, style guides, and layered assets pushed me to think both creatively and systematically.

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