The graphic system for the North American Competitiveness Working Group (NACWG) is meant to symbolically serve as a message and example of community between North America. Functionally, it serves as a relatively simple yet professional brand well suited for academic and policy-oriented communications.
The core logo for NACWG is a simple abstraction of the three national flags. Two dots represent the national colors of each nation (excluding white): double red for Canada, red and blue for the United States, and red and green for Mexico. The logo colors are high contrast adaptations of the official flag colors.
The NACWG color palette is comprised of warm and muted base colors with red accent colors. Reds where chosen to symbolize commonality between all three nations who all use red in their national flags.
Bebas Neue Pro by Ryoichi Tsunekawa was chosen for the headings for its modern look and compressed kerning. NACWG reports often have titles, headings, or subheadings that are long due to their academic audience. Using a compressed typeface allows most headings to be set on one or two lines (instead of three to four with a wider-set font).
The body copy is Calibri is keep operations simple via its default integration into Microsoft Word. This allows the contributors of NACWG to work in Microsoft Word and have a ballpark estimate of how a finalized publication will look and feel.
The report cover depicts the three nations as three CPUs on single motherboard. The abstracted art style creates consistency with the report's figures.
This map of North America was designed to de-emphasize national borders and help readers conceptualize North America as one cohesive unit.
This map was created using a mixture of QGIS for cartography and Adobe Illustrator for compositing. 10m subnational boundaries were sourced from Natural Earth. The globe shape was achieved with a custom orthographic projection in QGIS:+proj=ortho +lat_0=40.24 +lon_0=-100.48
This bar graph quickly shows the discrepancy between bilateral trade between Canada and Mexico compared to trade bilateral trade involving the United States.
A gradient was applied to the bar graph to create texture and visual interest.
This stacked bar graph quickly shows Canadian investment into EV battery manufacturing is a significant effort with the continent's efforts to invest in technologically-sophisticated manufacturing capability.
This map of North America was designed to emphasize where and how people and goods move through North America.
This map was created using a mixture of QGIS for cartography and Adobe Illustrator for compositing. 10m subnational boundaries and highway/railway data were sourced from Natural Earth; April border crossing volume data was sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and used to create the size-adjusted crossing locations.
