Branding and Packaging Design

FORE — Environmental Impact Awareness Campaign

Poster Series to Shift Perception of “Green” in Golf

FORE is a campaign designed to expose the unseen environmental costs of “perfectly green” golf courses — and to reframe what “healthy” land should actually look like.

The campaign origin is a cultural theory:

Color television normalized hyper-saturated, manicured golf courses — and helped create “Augusta National Syndrome” (the expectation that golf must be unnaturally lush and neon-green to be legitimate).

That aesthetic has been maintained for decades through poor environmental stewardship.

FORE invites the public — golfers and non-golfers — to recognize this reality and to shift demand toward natural greenscapes that allow wildlife, soil, and native vegetation to return.

Research Focus

4 areas consistently emerged as the most consequential ecological harms caused by modern golf courses:

1. Wildlife displacement
2. Water consumption
3. Land clearing / habitat loss
4. Chemical application

Those four issues became the organizing system for the campaign.

Identity

With this project, I knew that I needed to visually show the impacts of golf courses. I came up with the idea to create campaign posters. In order for the campaign to be successful. It will need cohesive branding.

The FORE logo unifies the campaign. Gotham was chosen for its geometric “O,” which allowed the mark to feel circular, target-like, and infrastructural (as well as mimiking a golf ball shape)— while the orange color introduces a direct cautionary signal (a visual language we reserve culturally for hazard).

Campaign Poster Series

A 4-piece poster series was created — one poster per environmental topic.

Each poster presents a single data point so large in scale it becomes undeniable.

The background of each poster is composed of the exact quantity of the units referenced in that data point.

example:
the “water” poster cites:

“An Olympic-size pool holds 660,000 gallons.
3,376 Olympic pools is the amount of water that East Coast golf courses use per day.”

The background of that poster is constructed from a repeated micro-vector of a pool — exactly 3,376 times.
The extreme scale becomes the visual punchline.

Each poster design is created my using layers of handcut paper. At first, my approach was to show the layers of earth that the chemicals would seep down into and destroy but at the end of my research the layers of paper became much more than that. 

The layers of paper turned into a symbolic representation of how each time I dove down a rabbit hole in my research I would come to one more awful conclusion about how golf courses harm the environment. 

Activation Tools

To bridge awareness into action, I created tear-off note cards — one for each topic — that can be filled out and returned to local golf courses to register concern. The tear off notecards will hopefully at least raise awareness on how you can help your own local golf course to become more sustainable for the future. 

A main content and education hub was built at FOREnature.com. This was a single place where research, data, and context around golf course pollution is accessible to the general public. In a multi-billion-dollar industry with nearly zero environmental transparency, centralizing information is itself a design intervention.

Exhibition

For the exhibit environment, the entry moment needed to be inviting — not punitive or accusatory.

A mini golf “F” shaped putting hole was created to pull people in via play, then lead them into the information.

It disarms — and then informs.

Outcome

FORE reframes “green” in golf as a choice — not a default.

The poster series serves as the visual hammer of the idea:
if we can quantify the harm, we can demand a different future for the land.