Ban the Tan

I love designing for causes. There's a warm fuzzy feeling that comes along with knowing you had a hand in creating something that has an effect on people in an emotional way. For this project, I decided to brand a campaign for a social cause or movement, rather than a for-profit product. Skin cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer and also one of the most preventable. Ban The Tan is a campaign aimed at teenagers (age 14 to 18, primarily female) to encourage them to prevent skin cancer by wearing sunscreen and not tanning or burning in the sun.

I've found most campaigns aimed at teenagers try to scare them into cooperating - think anti-smoking ads showing black lungs or anti-drunk driving ads showing bloody car crashes. While that may work in those cases, they make viewers feel like they're being scolded by an adult. Hardly a way to get them involved in the cause. For my campaign, I decided to come from a more friendly standpoint using a sarcastic, "oh no you didn't" tone (think of the movies "Clueless" or "Mean Girls") in slogans and materials to bring a sense of humor to the campaign. By making the cause fun and funny, it make the audience want to join in promoting the campaign through wearing branded merchandise, spreading materials across social media, discussing advertisements with friends, and so forth.

The campaign called for two logos - one for the campaign itself and one for the parent organization that would sponsor the campaign, were it a real one, the National Comprehensive Cancer Control Program (NCCCP).
The NCCCP logo is straight-forward, a logomark contained in a circle that echos the forms of the letters, colored in the unofficial cancer support color, lavender. While the NCCCP is an organization, I didn't want the logo to look too corporate because cancer is such an emotional issue. I aimed to strike a balance between the two sides.
The Ban The Tan logo is much bolder to really get the message across. The stacked orientation emphasizes each individual word and gives it a punch. A color palette of bright colors in all of the rainbow was selected to use for this logo and all promotional materials.





The central component of this campaign is the advertisements. A series of 8 posters, in two sets, were created to be displayed at locations where teenagers and the outdoors meet- beaches, parks, concerts, bus stops, amusement parks, etc. There are two sets of 4, with each set taking a different viewpoint. The first set is pro-pale and features characters from popular culture (what teenager doesn't love pop culture?) that are know for being pale and are appreciated for it. The second set is ant-tan/burn, yelling out reasons why tanning should be avoided.

Each set has an aesthetic that reflects it's message- the pro-pale posters are smooth, shiny, and refreshing. The anti-tan posters are cracked, aggressive, and kind of gross. Both sets feature strong, dynamic type to get the attention of the viewer and get across how important this message is.

Also created was a booklet that could be handed out at events, sent in the mail as part of promotional packets, placed on counters or information booths in public areas. This booklet, "The Big Book of Very Bad Tans", is a humorous look at the ugly side of tanning - tan lines. The tan lines are given names and are illustrated with a bold red to represent burns and secondary colors taken from the color palette. The booklet finishes with informational facts about skin cancer and tips on how to avoid burning and tanning.










Stickers were also created as hand-outs. In the one below, the sticker is the logo printed on a clear sheet. Would could be a good use of such a thing? How about teaching sleeping tanners a little lesson? Not that I would ever advocate such a mean spirited thing. Never.



Alternative sticker. Tanning bed = death bed. Gets the message across with strong imagery and muted, eerie colors.


Teenagers LOVE free stuff. They flock to it like seagulls to a french fry. Branded merchandise is one of the greatest ways to promote to a younger crowd as they don't particularly mind becoming a walking billboard.

All merchandise created for the campaign features the logo - and thus, the message- on white (for contrast) with the logo available in all the colors of the color palette. All the merchadise was chosen with purpose - shirts, light-weight sweatshirts, and umbrellas are all useful for covering up at the park or when hanging outside. Canvas totes are great for carrying belongings to the beach, which is where this message really counts. And bracelets and pins - wearable and collectible - are always a solid choice as they can go anywhere and with anything.





Missing for this post: The website and twitter. Not having a social media element in a campaign aimed at teenagers would just be silly. That's currently being work on so keep an eye out for that.

Web/Interactive work

I've been lucky enough to be exposed to a fair amount of web and interactive design. I enjoy the challenge of designing experiences, of having to predict how people act, and having to work within a set of limitations. Unfortunately, my lack of math/science/technical side means that a few of the projects shown below never became fully realized. But I'm very proud of the designs.

Clegg Lacrosse - HTML site showing off the accomplishments of the 3 Clegg siblings. View it here.

Why Reform? - interactive (flash) site explaining the reasons we should reform health care (which, happily, ended up happening.)

Cheese - informational site explaining all about cheese (also flash)

Design for the interface of a touch-screen, in-home console that controls electrical systems.

Design for a widget for Syracuse.com, a local news website.

And of course, my website (which you should totally show to everyone you know and their families. Help me out, I could use a job).

Advertising

(Click thumbs for better color quality) For my advertising class, we were told to pick a company or brand and create new advertising campaign for them. I decided to choose Five Guys Burgers and Fries. I've always been impressed with them. Beside having amazing burgers, they also have a great philosophy behind the way they operate. Everything is served fresh- they have no freezers- and the know exactly where the potatoes they use for fries came from and are proud to say so. They use peanut oil for frying- so there's no trans fats- and 100% USDA beef. There is very little branding in the store- you're served your meal in paper bags and Styrofoam cups, with a side of napkins that probably came in an industrial pack from BJ's- and no national advertising campaign despite having franchises in numerous states.

For my campaign, I decided to focus on the food. To be honest, Five Guys is not the most convenient fast food joint - no drive thru, a sometimes long wait because nothing is prepared ahead of time, and peanut served in open containers- but the food is amazing. I noticed Five Guys customers were the kind of people that appreciated a good hearty meal- college kids, middle aged men, and high school boys (including a whole football team. Whoaa).

The great thing about Five Guys is that they offer 15 different toppings that you can add to your burger- for free. You can get as many or as little as you want, even doubling up on them, and they don't charge you for it. That's something you can't get anywhere else. Do a little math and these 15 toppings on any of Five Guys burgers lend themselves to 250,000 different combination. Damn, son.

I used this information to consult some people from Five Guys target audience- male college kids- and asked them for THEIR Five Guys burger combos (the title's were theirs too). I picked the 5 best combinations and created personality profiles for each burger, asking "What kind of guy would eat this burger?" I showed that personality on the wrists and arms of the person holding the burger, a different personality for each burger. These wonderful first-person perspective "hey, can't you just picture yourself eating these burgers?" photos were taken by the lovely Emily Bogle.

Behind each burger, screened on the background, is the name of the burger, the combo number (out of a possible 250,000), and the ingredients in the burger. The idea is to really hit home the fact that there are so many different ways to make a burger at Five Guys and everyone can find a combo that's right for them. And if the burger you see sparks your curiosity, the ingredient list is right there for you to take with you to your next Five Guys visit. The type is done in an action-movie-poster-esque way to catch the eye of that male demographic.

I will say, it was a lot of fun to put together these images with all the symbolism that went into them. It was certainly the first and last time I will ever spend $30 on burgers (or try to shoot fresh food- after 3 hours in a wrapper, no burgers is appetizing).

To go along with the 5 print Ads (get it? 5 ads, 5 guys. Oh yeah, I went there), I mocked up a website "burger builder" and a guerrilla marketing campaign. The burger builder is designed to go along with Five Guys current online look and act as a way to create combos virtually, then either save to share with the online Five Guys community or print them out to take with you to the store. The types of burgers go across the top, the toppings on the side, and each selected topping shows up on a replica of the 5 guys receipt (a distinctive feature) to complete the experience.

The guerrilla marketing campaign acts sort of in the same way, where you can create and share your combos but in a physical setting. Replicas of the Five Guys receipts, with blank spaces for you to write in your choices, can be torn off, filled in, and pinned to the fan board (another Five Guys signature feature). Meant to be posted in a public hub such as a downtown area, passer-bys can pull other people's combos off the board and take it with them if they should feel moved to do so.



I think this is the longest entry I've ever written on the blog. But this is probably the most in-depth project I've had yet. Thanks for actually reading it all!

Editorial Design

Editorial Design is a class where a designer is paired up with a photographer and given the challenge of designing a spread covering either a positive or negative subject or viewpoint.

For our first editorial spread, I worked with Jackie Allen and we chose to showcase the poem "fa|ll|n's ", a litteral (spelled with two t's) poetics poem from the collection "+|'me'S-pace". Litteral Poetics is a division of psycholinguistics and a method for studying psychic structure in the English tongue from the viewpoint of poetry. The litteral perspective sees language not as a tool, but as an organ that has it's own vital function. The belief behind litteral poetics is that a variety of words can be explained as the different arrangements of a set of atomic characters.

Because the poem is so abstract in it's meaning, we decided we wanted to portray it's mood in our imagery and type. The poem has a feeling of isolation and frustration, which is compounded in the reader when they try to understand the poem. With so many of the alphabetic letters converted into punctuation and symbols, one has to go over the poem many times before they can grasp what is going on. The photo is composed of a bird's nest-like image filled with letters to further reflect the entanglement of meaning and type. It's a cluttered mess at first sight but the message becomes clear when light is poured through it. An excerpt of our poem is arranged to reflect the wispy look of the nest's tendrils, with an explanation of what litteral poetics is on the neighboring page. The whole composition comes together to produce a study of space and type, much as the poem itself does.

You can check out other designs from the class at Positive Negative.

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all.
Especially during week 10.