Global coffee by sungun chang from usa

“Global coffee” is a promotional poster designed to create awareness regarding coffee drinking culture and its connection to global warming. Coffee, being the 2nd most traded commodity after oil, is the most popular drink of our modern society. However, there is not enough information given to consumers how their coffee drinking habit can contribute in global warming. Coffee plantation is causing the removal of natural forests and destroys biodiversity. Also, there are intensive energy requirements and carbon emissions to plant, harvest, and transport them to countries like the United states, which imports all of its coffee beans in order to satisfy 450 million cups of coffee needs per day along with that many disposable paper cups.

“Global coffee” is the satire designed to help viewers to realize these hidden connections between coffee and global warming. With an intuitive visual that stimulates viewers’ curiosity and imagination, “Global coffee” successfully creates lasting imagery of warning that can be reminded to viewers when they see swirl pattern inside their coffee mug.

To be specific, the poster’s visual can be classified in to three parts: picture in a magazine page, logo of coffee brand, and simple pen drawing of a mug.

Picture of hurricane, which is one of many abnormal weather disaster caused by global warming, effectively creates official atmosphere and conveys seriousness of global warming problem when placed in a magazine page with full of text. Roughly torn out magazine edge hints on the destructive ramification of global warming.

Second, the homage of starbucks logo was used as a symbol of highly commercialized coffee consumption culture of north America and Asia that has caused coffee growers to switch from traditional shade cultivation to more profitable but less environmentally friendly sun cultivation method.

With the help of a few simple pen drawn lines that mimics outline of coffee mug, these two separated images merge together to create an intuitive metaphor. Image of the hurricane can now be interpreted as a coffee swirl inside a coffee mug. It is a symbolic image representing how a huge environmental issue such as global warming is linked to a microscopic action such as drinking a cup of coffee. The substitution of hurricane in the place of coffee swirl intends to arouse viewers curiosity and allow them to decipher its meaning. Once the viewer establish pictorial association between coffee and global warming, the message would be reminded through other real life coffee mug and spiral. As a result, viewers would walk away with heightened sense of environmental awareness and consuming behavior that cannot be easily forgotten even if they want to.