Hi friend,

We hope you had a great Earth Day! The Avery & Brown team had a blast getting involved with it this year and can't wait to carry that momentum into May.

Did you do anything awesome for Earth Day or attend The Big One yourself? We'd love to hear about it.

🔍 Fun fact of the week: Mount Thor, found on Baffin Island, Canada, is the tallest vertical sheer drop in the world. If you took a step off the peak, you'd fall about a mile before you hit anything. We bet that'd be a real killer bungee jump.

The Avery & Brown team take Westminster

For 2023, the Avery & Brown team chose to do Earth Day slightly differently by putting an A&B spin on this year's official theme: 'invest in our planet'. In a campaign spanning around 2 weeks, with 10 posts and 5 blogs, the whole team got involved in letting our community know how we're investing in the planet.

For the main event of our Earth Day celebrations, and as part of our ongoing support of XR Waverley & Borders, the team headed up to London to join Business Declares and Extinction Rebellion at The Big One: a four-day, indirect action that took place throughout Westminster, demanding change to tackle the climate crisis.

That wasn't our only event in the last couple of weeks. Russ & Tim hosted their second People, Planet, Pint event of the year over at the Castle pub in Farnham. As always, it was another great evening, and we can't wait until the next one in June.

If you're down for some reading, the team put out some great blogs during the run of our Earth Day campaign. Beth did a deep dive into green investing, Josh explored ways we can invest in nature, and Anna let us know how we can get involved with individual action. If you want to catch all the individual action the team got up to for Earth Day, you can find it in our activity showcase.

As for what's going on right this second, Russ & Tim are over in Barcelona attending the GBCI Europe Circle, a huge meet-up of 100+ European sustainable building professionals. We're sure they'll have tons to tell us about their trip by the time the next issue of nineteen eighty four rolls around!

Designs for the future of greener energy

Design Studio Layer has created the new visuals and branding for a U.S. based start-up powering vehicles with hydrogen. The new designs reflect the pragmatic and utilitarian nature of Croft, using mostly monochrome colourways and 'architectural' letter forms. The start-up is looking to create a blueprint for an enduring and scalable green-hydrogen economy with its nano-cartridge system that can power retrofitted vehicles using hydrogen.

Mamma Mia! Dolmio has just seen a shift to a bold new brand identity. Headed by brand and design consultancy Elmwood, the new graphics, messaging, and photography developed for the sauce brand aims to introduce a new, younger audience to the joys of bolognese. We personally hope they keep those puppets they used in the adverts, though.

The famous remembrance poppy is seeing its first redesign in 28 years. In a sustainable move by design consultancy Matter, the new poppies produced by the Royal British Legion will now be made entirely of paper from coffee cup waste and recycled wood fibres. We can expect to see the new poppies ready for this year's Armistice Day.

How to spot the new shades of greenwash

50 shades of... greenwash? Not quite, but marketing agency Enviral has put out a great new blog on the new shades of greenwash and how we can avoid falling into the trap. Going over topics like the history of greenwash, the new forms greenwashing out there, and how we can overcome the problem, this one's a great read for any business.

In an attempt to avoid looking like they've lost the plot with campaigns like the Pepsi disaster of 2017, more big companies are turning to younger people to better understand what campaigns will and won't result in a faux pas incident. New York PR agency Berns Communications Group has already established a 'Z Suite'; a group of students and influencers providing Gen Z insights. The question is, is this driven by principles or profit?

Imagine you've just loaded up Netflix. Do you remember the sound that plays when the logo appears on the screen? In a new report by Spotify, audio ads were found to be better for brand identity than visual ads with a 24% higher brand recall rate. There's no major science behind the reasons why sound sells more. Humans are just better at remembering what they hear rather than what they see.

UK rivers have a big, smelly problem

Have you taken a dip in your local river recently? We really hope not, because almost all rivers in the UK are affected by chemical contamination. It's down to different reasons; from lack of investment in old infrastructure to the disruption of water treatment supplies to name a few. But the good news is, there's a lot the UK can learn from other European countries when it comes to cleaning up rivers!

One of the UK's largest seagrass beds has just been discovered off the coast of Cornwall. As well as being an extremely effective carbon sink, the meadow is home to many sea critters like seahorses, pipefish, and scallops. Although this is an amazing new find, the work will need to be put in to make sure we protect it.

That's not the only time Cornwall's been in the news this month. South West Water has just been fined more than £2.1m for their sewage pollution throughout Cornwall and Devon between 2016 and 2020. The worst offence was a 35-hour long sewage dumping session at Watergate Bay that pushed E. coli levels in the water about 2,000 times higher than they should have been.

Each issue of nineteen eighty four, we feature a different Certified B Corporation, to celebrate the brands which are working hard to create a better business world. To learn more about B Corps, click here.

Our featured B Corp this week is...

Studio O+A

'Our central idea is that every client has a story and that a work environment is a great vehicle for telling it'.

Studio O+A based in San Francisco, USA, is a design firm specialising in holistically designed environments, taking account of interior architecture and brand strategy. Some of their works include Adidas' Performance Zone and the McDonald's HQ.

To them, they don't just design interiors, they design experiences.

Have you enjoyed this issue of nineteen eighty four? Let us know your feedback by dropping us a line at [email protected]!