Google Environmental Insights Explorer

Product Identity & Digital Design 
Role: Designer
Teams: Instrument & Google

The Google Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) is an important tool in Google’s Sustainability practice that empowers local governments, advocates, and citizens around the world to understand their emissions data and identify strategies for climate action. The tool’s brand and marketing must stand out, simply demonstrate its depth and value, and neatly live  alongside Google’s design system. The tool’s design must achieve these aims while speaking to a wide range of audiences from politicians, to climate activists, to citizen scientists.

Icons help establish a visual language that is unique to EIE while decidedly connected to Google. Simple overlapping forms, like buildings, buses, trees, and the sun, quickly convey complex insights, like transportation emissions, building emissions, solar potential, tree canopy, and air quality. When available, color is used to highlight this overlap and emphasize the moment when collected data becomes insight.

The newly designed EIE icons borrow from and add depth to system icons while laying the groundwork for an expanded visual vocabulary capable of extending all the way to illustrations.

Curated aerial photography and satellite imagery show off EIE’s diverse uses and global impact. This birds-eye view will also become a familiar vantage point as users map and visualize local data.

Iconography, photography, visualizations, and copy are strategically aligned to speak to different audiences and tell unique stories.

EIE’s landing page within Google Sustainability is key to introducing the tool, highlighting its uses, and exciting new users to start using EIE in creative ways to strengthen their local climate action plans and build toward a carbon-free future.