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How and where food is grown, processed, transported and disposed has colossal impacts on our planet. To unpack these complex issues in a compelling and inspiring way, we built an interactive journey for UNEP that takes you for a stroll – literally – through the global food system.

The global food system is causing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.

To make things worse, it still fails to stem hunger and malnutrition around the world. Clearly, our food system is broken, and needs urgent fixing.

This system is a messy tangle of regulations, corporate interests, trade agreements, social and cultural dynamics – not exactly the kind of stuff that fires up people’s excitement, let alone interest. 


To turn boring into beguiling, UNEP created ‘Journey of Food’, a colourful visualisation targeted at their online audience that highlights the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ for food systems transformation. Going one step further, they came to Catalyze to further amplify this message through a positive, online narrative.

The term ‘interactive website’ tends to be thrown around a little loosely these days. And our team was definite that Journey of Food would follow an itinerary that requires active exploration, not be constrained by conventions, all while maintaining user-friendliness: a tall order that meant going beyond your standard vertical scrolling experience.

Our initial concept envisioned the interactive experience as a continuous, seamless journey, where a single character transitions between chapters, "changing" outfits along the way. As we explored different ideas, our visual and web development teams considered various alternatives, always mindful ofb factors like website loading time and accessibility. In the end, while we maintained the linear map approach, we chose to divide the narrative into eight sections to make the content more digestible and easier to navigate.

With the concept locked in, we turned to the visuals. Our designers began to work on the journey's characters, drawing inspiration from cultural references to the journey's case studies, which were then collated into moodboards.

The moodboards fed into rough sketches (with a little help from Paperpillar), which we progressively refined into increasingly high-fidelity renderings. All this was highly iterative (and not always linear!). Along the way we cross-checked the artwork with UNEP to make sure we were being culturally-sensitive to the people and environments we were depicting. We repeated the approach with the design of the 'worlds' these characters would explore.

Truth be told, Journey of Food stretched our visual design and web development team well outside our comfort zone – in a good way. With so much noise on topics such as zero hunger (SDG 2), climate action (SDG13), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), life on land (SDG 15), we felt we had to explore less treaded creative territory.

Click here to see the final website.

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