Jack Watson

Ocean Acidification. October 2025

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Infographics are a topic I’ve always wanted to cover on Adobe Live, and this ocean illustration was something I started back around 2019. I had an opportunity to do both when Adobe Live reached out about an in studio event in San Francisco again working in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign covering more advanced topics. I also got to hang out with two other incredibly talented designers, Elisha Zepeda and Tyler Pate and coincidentally we all were sort of working on projects for print which was cool.

Final Design

Ocean Acidification, final poster, polluted city background with large wave dividing the sea and sky. ocean bird flies above. Carbon dioxide atoms enter the water from pollution run off, become carbonic acid which decrease the ocean pH, calcium carbonate, and marine diversity. Decreasing populations of shellfish, and coral affects the lager food webs that depend on them. More than one billion people depend on the ocean. Over 50% of coral reefs have died since the 1950s. Primarily due to coral bleaching from low calcium carbonate. Coral reef in silhouette along the bottom of the illustration with arrows depicting the food change between large marine mammals, small fish, and coral.

The illustrations were all created in Adobe Illustrator and put into a Library to pull into InDesign. Then the layout, text, arrows, and math content was added in InDesign. The chemical equations use Math Expressions in InDesign which is a really handy way to create mathML. It’s not particularly easy or straightforward to find fonts that support special math and Greek characters, and mathML solves that need allowing not only for special characters but the correct layout, for things like fractions, super, and subscripts. The composition is meant to lead your eye from the initial topic, through the process, and then the effects.

Illustrations

The supporting illustrations help tell the story, all of the chemical breakdowns of carbon dioxide and water that occur during the process, as well as some of the most impacted animals. I also included illustrations of sea kelp and eel grass, to talk about the positive effects those can have to balance out all of the negativity.

Ocean Acidification, atomic illustration, bicarbonate ion, carbon dioxide, carbonate ion, carbonic acid, hydrogen ions, water
Ocean Acidification, animal illustrations, clam, regal blue tang, sea star, sea urchin, kelp, eel grass

Color Palette

Ocean Acidification, color palette, 4 dark blues for background, 3 light blues and teal for foreground, dark, mid and light brown, dark red and light red for accents.

Social Media

In the second part of the live stream, I switched to focus on Adobe Express. Again, because I had a library of assets, I was able to quickly remix them and come up with an on brand animation. I’ve worked with past clients that have reused individual statistics, sometimes adding a few more facts, to create content for social media. I could see this as being a great way to advertise for an exhibit if maybe this poster was a part of a museum exhibit.

Social post, changes in ocean pH over time, and how sea grass can mitigate carbon dioxide’s effects.

Mock-ups

I liked the idea of a museum exhibit on this topic that after the Adobe Live event, I put together some mock-ups showing how the graphics could be used in that context.

Ocean Acidification, mock-up of museum banners on museum building. Large coral reef illustration in all blues across 4 banners
Ocean Acidification, poster exhibit mock-up.