This print campaign was developed for a substance use prevention program overseen by Mutual Ground, a local domestic/sexual violence and substance use prevention nonprofit. The campaign's objective is to educate children around high school age about ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences. These experiences can significantly impact the likelihood of a child to later develop substance addictions or dependencies in the future.
The most widely used materials produced from the campaign are the brochure and postcard shown, which have both English and Spanish variants. A billboard was also produced for the campaign, but had much more limited runtime.
The pseudo-mascot of the bluebird was developed as a way to make the campaign seemed more friendly and less intimidating to the target audience, and the color scheme was chosen both as a way to further decrease the intimidation of the subject as well as to represent colors commonly associated with substance use awareness. Additionally, the texting and phone assets were developed to catch eye of our target audience through employing a familiar communication format, with the goal of making the subject seem less formal and extreme.
Throughout this project, I also collaborated with an industry-specific focus group to tailor the messaging and design to our target audience. This group consisted primarily of counselors and educators at Mutual Ground, who were able to provide unique insights and feedback based on their own experience with the subject matter and the audience. This feedback was vital to the refinement process, as it informed the ways in which many portions of the content were broached.
As previously mentioned, all materials were produced with both English and Spanish variants, which presented a unique challenge and opportunity during the project. I was provided with the unique opportunity to work with a translator to handle proper interpretation of the Spanish materials, and after the type was finalized, I was faced with the challenge of ensuring that it was set in a way that mirrored the original English. This required significant adjustments to be made to spacing and material orientation, but the final product manages to avoid significant typographic changes based on spacing.
