Jess berliner

A first in Africa! I was part of a team that designed and developed an online course on biomimicry, for a South African coal mining company, Exxaro, whose vision is to move away from fossil fuel energy. In order to do so, they need their staff to be trained in a wholly new way of thinking – one which supports clean, renewable energy as the basis for new economic systems. They are further supporting innovation in Africa by allowing the course to be made publicly available!

I worked closely with the subject matter expert, Claire Janish, and a film production company, ReWild. My role in this project was as the Instructional Designer, which encompassed: design the client questionnaire and resulting course outline (high-level content and timing); establish the visual identity & templates for the video content; co-create and review video content, design the digital handbooks that accompany the video content, and conduct extensive research on content and visual assets. 


After 2 years of proposals and preparation, we put the entire course together in only 4 months! It consists of 3 modules – Biomimicry 101, Biomimicry Life’s Principles and Biomimicry Masterclass.

You can access the course at Learnbiomimicry.com

After 7 years in the working world, I returned to university, in order to pursue my Bachelor's Degree in Communication Design (having completed the N.Dip qualification in 2007).

For my thesis project, I chose to research the integration of biomimicry into high school curricula, and how this process could be facilitated. My findings indicated that successful integration relies heavily on how teachers interpret biomimicry and its relation to their context. A deeper understanding of biomimicry is still quite limited but educators do not have time to educate themselves on the topic. Additionally, existing educators’ resources, while abundant, are overly specific to particular contexts.

Therefore, the design intervention took shape as a a website that assists educators by giving them a succinct, but comprehensive, overview of biomimicry (and related concepts) and provides resources that easy to integrate into multiple contexts. Finally, access to a local network of other educators, resources and biomimicry professionals helps educators to foster future development through the use of rapid feedback loops.

This is an A5 handbook that I designed for Biomimicry South Africa, in approx. 2013. It was designed to give a short introduction to biomimicry, so that readers could grasp the fundamental concepts in a short space of time. It has been successfully used on various expeditions and workshops.

My role was to edit the content (that was supplied to me by the author), and to design the booklet.

I created this series of designs as part of the promotion of a biomimicry workshop that I was running. Each design refers to a biomimicry case study, and the respective questions create intrigue, as most people do not know what the answers are. These case studies were covered in the workshop.

I created this series of designs as part of an awareness & promotion campaign. The idea is to convey the concept of biomimicry quickly and clearly. Each “quick card” features the inspiring organism at the top, the emulated mechanism in the middle (in text) and the resulting human design at the bottom.

This is an infographic that I designed for Save Our Seas Foundation in 2014, which featured in their online magazine. This job included creating the layout as well as all the illustrations.

Save Our Seas Foundation gave a copy of the design to Ruth Leeny (Save Africa's Sawfishes) to use as part of her international sawfish conservation work, to educate local communities on sawfish conservation. You can see more of her amazing work here on her Facebook page: Protect Africas Sawfishes.

The infographic has been translated into at least 2 other languages, and has been used in Madagascar, Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, India and Mozambique!

This was a 5-part series of infographics, addressing different aspects of sawfish conservation. The designs were an update on the sawfish infographic that I designed for the Save Our Seas Foundation magazine in 2014. It ran for one week on social media (in 2017 and again in 2018), and the images were favourably received by Facebook followers. You can see the images on the SOSF page: www.facebook.com/saveourseasngo

This is a series of infographics that I designed for Manta Trust, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of mobulid rays. These purpose of these designs was to make their key conservation strategies – originally appearing as flow diagrams and tables – more visually appealing and engaging. The designs were created for the context of Manta Trust’s research publication “Conserving Mobulid Rays – A Global Strategy and Action Plan”, which can be found on their website.

There are 6 infographics in total:
Threats Overview; Theories of Change – Bycatch, Targeted Fishing, Habitat, and Tourism; and the Priority Areas for Action map.

This design job was a report from the ImagineThat office on CPUT’s contribution toward Cape Town’s World Design Capital year January 2013 – January 2015. It was a compiled and designed as a hardcover book, but unfortunately the project ran out of funding so was never published.

This is the corporate identity design for a company that I co-founded with two other women, called Imaginature (we have subsequently closed it down). The slogan was “Inspire Genius”, and the intention behind the company was to take people on inspiring, immersive and educational experiences in nature.

The graphics were an extension of this idea, in that each one revealed something a hidden, underlying pattern of the organism – creating intrigue and showing that there was more to learn from nature if you learn to look closely.

My first Wacom tablet project! I used a photograph as a reference, but did not use it in any way for the illustration. I thoroughly enjoyed this process, and would love to create more projects like this – I find skeletal anatomy to be very fascinating from the perspective of functionality, as well as the aesthetic of the forms.

A hobby that I share with my husband is taking photographs of various subjects with our microscope. It is faithful old microscope, but lacks any technological visual aids, so we use a cellphone camera to capture images of whatever is on the stage. Because the focal distance is so shallow, we take hundreds of individual photographs (each at a different focal length) and stack them in Photoshop. One can only see a small section of the subject at a time (e.g. just the head), so this stacking process is repeated for the entire length of the subject. I arrange and then join these stacks together to reveal the images that you see here.