Making the world a smarter place
Smarter Cities Challenge
The Smarter Cities Challenge deploys top IBM experts to help cities around the world address their most critical challenges. A team is deployed on the ground for three weeks to work closely with city leaders and deliver recommendations on how to make the city smarter and more effective. Originally this citizenship programme was due to run for three years (2011-2013), with $50 million worth of IBM knowledge across 100 cities, however due to the success of the programme it was extended through 2014, 2015 and 2016. Our role was to create final reports and/or executive summaries that the client could share with the City and upload to the Smarter Cities Challenge website. I had to work closely with our writers, account manager and the client to ensure deadlines were achievable and each stage was being completed on time.
Reports – The main output of the Smarter Cities Challenge was for each team to create reports based on their findings during their visit to the city. The content team would take the draft version of the report from the team, refine it, then provide me with a final version ready for layout. I would then lay that copy into a template I created in InDesign, including preset paragraph, character and table styles for extra efficiency.
Image correction – Every report needed an image and a map of the relevant city to be used for the SCC mark on the front cover. The SCC mark is formed of three elements forming the macro (yellow), meso (blue) and micro (green) views of the city. The process involves desaturating the original image, boosting the levels and then converting the colour mode to duotone.
Graphics/diagrams – As well as laying out the copy, each report had diagrams and graphics that needed recreating in the IBM style. Most of these were basic diagrams, but a few of them enabled me to take a more creative approach to it.
Refresh – The original creative output for the reports was developed before I started working on the project so for the first two years I was laying the reports into the pre-existing style. By the middle of the third year of the project the IBM Citizenship had informed us that the Smarter Cities Challenge was being extended due to the success of the programme. As a result I decided to update the look of the reports and executive summaries to make them feel cleaner.
Executive summaries – Each report was accompanied by an executive summary that could be upload to the Smarter Cities Challenge website. As with the reports, midway through 2013 I refreshed the look of the executive summaries to match the changes that had been made to the reports. Originally the executive summaries were two page documents, but during the 2015/6 run of reports I created a new style of executive summary that was a single page.
Postcards – In 2013, I artworked a set of postcards based on every report we had done to date as a gift for the client. To house the postcards, we created a folder using the Smarter Cities Challenge style.
