Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning Illustration #3

So me and a group of 4 others (Calvin, Jørn, Kenneth, Tobias) were lucky enough to work with Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND) for our Bachelor project. NND is a state agency tasked by the Norwegian government to handle all of Norway's radioactive waste.

Our job was to create a visual representation showing all the positive outcomes of establishing a national nuclear waste repository in a local community.

So we set out to create 8 illustrations showing the most important positive outcomes. We also created an isometric representation of the repository itself.

This particular illustration shows the cooperation with local businesses.

The design process has been quite long, it stretched across the whole school semester. We've had a long research process in the start to understand the subject we were going to work with, alongside a lot of academic work. We've held focus groups and user surveys to understand how people perceive this particular topic. We've gained a lot of useful input and important things to consider before starting the production period.

It was super important to create these illustrations with words like safety, credibility and responsibility in mind, when representing such an important organisation. Colours had to be as neutral and positive as possible, not hinting at anything related to the negative perception of the word "nuclear" at all.

Then we were ideating and looking for an appropriate illustration style, by going through tons of inspiration and analysing how others have executed similar projects. We landed on something that seemed to fit what we had in our minds and we are quite happy with our decisions. This style of illustrations gave us the most flexibility in terms of consistency and reuse of elements, and made it quite easy to work with.

Tobias sketched all the elements, and I illustrated them in Affinity Designer. Tested around with different compositions, colours, shadows and other additional elements, until everything felt finalised.

In the end of the project period, both the focus group participants and NND themselves were very positive to what we created, local municipality representatives were actually very positively surprised, they said they didn't await to see that level of results at all. That was very nice for us to hear, it made us feel comfortable with the fact that we've managed to remember and include every important detail into each single illustration.

If you would like to read more about the work that NND does, you can do so by visiting the following link: https://www.norskdekommisjonering.no/

I will also most probably post a full case study of the project on my website in some near future.