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Blue plus yellow creates green. Remove the blue, and the green disappears. That is the color-theory argument at the core of a Brazilian creative campaign that has spent the past six months making an unusually elegant case for marine protection, using screen printing, mineral pigments, and a very deliberate reimagining of the national flag.

The campaign is called No Blue, No Green. It was created by Droga5 São Paulo, the Brazilian office of the global creative agency, for SOS Oceano, a Brazilian coalition of NGOs working to expand the country’s marine protected areas. Phase one launched at Rio Ocean Week in October 2025, when the agency stripped the blue and green from the Brazilian flag and let the absence do the work. Phase two, which rolled out in early April 2026, moves from subtraction to craft: six original screen-printed artworks, produced in collaboration with Black Madre Studio and Joules & Joules Laboratory, each one pairing a marine species with its terrestrial counterpart inside the yellow diamond of the Brazilian flag.

A Campaign Built Through Craft

Screen printing was chosen for its chromatic precision and layered ink application, which together allow the prints to honor the tradition of Brazilian naturalist illustration while landing the campaign’s political message with clarity. More unusually, the pigments themselves are natural mineral-based, developed over months of research with Joules & Joules Laboratory to achieve accurate hues without any synthetic solvents. A campaign about reducing marine pollution, produced with no petrochemical inputs, is a different proposition from one that merely names the problem.

Each of the six prints draws a visual equivalence between marine and terrestrial ecosystems: a humpback whale alongside Amazonian flora, coral structures set against forest canopy, reef fish interlaced with rainforest birds. The yellow diamond of the flag remains the framing device in every piece, a visual constant that gives the series its unity and grounds the argument in national identity rather than abstract environmental appeal.

The Coalition Behind the Campaign

SOS Oceano is less a single organization than an alliance. Its seven member groups include Sea Shepherd Brazil, Rede Pró-UC, Instituto Baleia Jubarte, Divers for Sharks, the Seaspiracy Foundation, Núcleo de Educação e Monitoramento Ambiental (NEMA), and Projeto Golfinho Rotador, with support from the Blue Marine Foundation. Their shared advocacy focuses on expanding Brazil’s marine protected areas and aligning the country’s policy with UN Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, alongside the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

For context on the stakes: Brazil’s coastline runs more than 7,400 kilometers, but the country’s coastal marine protections have faced sustained pressure from development, industrial fishing interests, and shifting political winds over recent years. Public awareness of ocean conservation in Brazil, despite the scale of its maritime territory, remains significantly lower than awareness of Amazon deforestation. Campaigns like No Blue, No Green are one of the ways the coalition is trying to shift that imbalance.

The Creative Reasoning

Diego Limberti, Chief Design Officer at Droga5 São Paulo, described the throughline across both phases:

“The beginning of this project showed that design can condense a complex environmental truth into a single, felt symbol. In this phase, the elements of the flag remain part of the campaign’s visual process, but they are now reinterpreted to emphasize the animals that live in marine parks and their relationship with the forest. One biome depends on the other, and this is highlighted by the colors of Brazil’s greatest symbol.”

André Maciel, Creative Director at Black Madre Studio, framed the underlying logic more plainly:

“The project is rooted in color theory. When we say without blue there is no green, we’re working with the fundamental logic of primary and secondary colors: blue and yellow create green.”

The Science Behind the Metaphor

The campaign’s central claim, that terrestrial life depends on a functional ocean, is not rhetorical flourish. The ocean absorbs approximately 30 percent of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions each year and produces somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, figures tracked consistently by NOAA and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Marine ecosystems regulate global temperature, drive the water cycle that sustains terrestrial rainfall, and hold the majority of the planet’s biological carbon stocks. Degrade the ocean as a functioning system, and the conditions that allow forests, agriculture, and human settlement to exist begin to degrade with it.

Put more directly: the color metaphor at the heart of the campaign is, in ecological terms, almost literal.

Where to See the Work

The six original prints are on view at Galeria Plano in Barra Funda, São Paulo, and the campaign is running nationally across billboards, newspapers, and magazines. A short film documenting the project, produced with Black Madre Studio and sound design by Bumblebeat, is available below.

A complete project gallery, with high-resolution views of each print and the full list of production credits, is hosted on Black Madre Studio’s Behance page.

Why the Work Matters Beyond Brazil

There is a broader argument embedded in the campaign that is worth naming. Environmental advocacy often struggles because the science feels abstract and the rhetoric feels tired. No Blue, No Green sidesteps both traps by letting the image carry the argument and following through with craft that matches. The prints can be looked at as design, read as advocacy, and held as a physical object, each of those modes reinforcing the others.

For the coalition behind SOS Oceano, which still has to do the slower and harder work of policy change, that kind of layered visibility is the real prize. A campaign that gets attention in design publications and award shows can travel into classrooms, government offices, and international press in ways that a conventional advocacy message rarely does. The coalition structure itself, with multiple organizations working under a shared visual identity, also points to something replicable: civil society groups pooling their advocacy through unified creative strategy rather than competing for the same attention.

The yellow diamond, reframed as a site of ecological argument, can carry new content indefinitely. That is a useful thing for a coalition still in it for the long haul.

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Learn more:

• SOS Oceano coalition members: Sea Shepherd Brazil, Instituto Baleia Jubarte, Divers for Sharks, Projeto Golfinho Rotador, and others
• Campaign film: vimeo.com/1178605134
• Full project on Behance: behance.net/gallery/247332271/SOS-Oceano-No-blue-no-green
• Exhibition: Plano Estúdio, Barra Funda, São Paulo (on view now)