Climate Diplomacy
An editorial system for adelphi's foreign-policy report
For adelphi — the Berlin think tank co-publishing this report with the German Federal Foreign Office — I designed both editions of their Climate Diplomacy series while at stoffers/steinicke. The first edition set the visual system; the 2013 edition refined the information graphics and tightened the typography throughout.
Client
adelphi
Role
Editorial & Information Design
Context
Agency Work (stoffers/steinicke)
Industry
Public Policy & Environment
The grid does the heavy lifting
The report runs long, so the hierarchy has to carry a lot. Four colour-coded chapter tabs — Road Ahead in orange, Global Level in blue, Capacities in green, Outreach in purple — anchor the navigation, and whitespace paces the dense policy text so readers aren't fighting the page.
Timeline and event map
The timeline runs across a double-page spread, mapping climate-diplomacy events by region and category, 2011–2014. I drew it as a grid of speech-bubble pins so readers can scan 'what happened where' in seconds. The event map reuses the same coding — timeline and map read as one.
Where the reader pauses
Between the research sections I placed full-bleed reportage photography — a Rajasthani woman drawing water, flooded streets in Dhaka — alongside pull quotes from the experts interviewed. Each one is a pause where the reader can breathe before the next dense argument.
Second edition, same book
It's the 2013 edition of a report I'd designed once before, so nothing started over. I kept the system intact — colour tabs, cover grid, typography — and focused on micro-details: header kerning, cleaner information graphics, tighter margin tabs. Both editions sit side by side as one series.
