The Challenge
Old meets the new
Girl Rising needed an identity for their 2020 storytelling initiative. The goal of this campaign was to leverage their audience to help tell unheard stories of how young people are responding to Covid-19 and issues of Racial injustice in America and throughout the world. In order to accomplish this they needed a campaign identity that helped attract young people to enter into the competition.
The Solution
A fresh take on an established brand
Girl Rising wanted me to create an identity with clear ties to their established brand, while also adding in an element of something new. This was a delicate balance where most of the typography, and colors were based on the GR brand, while the image treatment took a new direction.
Key Art
The voice of the people
In order to set the tone of the campaign I needed to create key art that was dynamic and vibrant, something that felt communal. In order to do this I ended up creating a collage aesthetic that had a few key elements. Firstly I knew I wanted to involve signs, because this year has become a year of protest, and signs are an important symbol of that. Closely tied to the signs are the images of hands and fists. I wanted to show a clear connection from the messages in the signs to the communities who are speaking out. Lastly I wanted to use a mix of halftone images, and paint textures, these two aesthetics have a long history with protest art, and they felt appropriate to round out the campaign's aesthetic.
Social Media
expanding the system
After the Key Art was defined and approved by Girl Rising and HP (Did I mention they were the corporate sponsor?) I had to create social media graphics to help launch the campaign and drive traffic to the website. This involved finding new ways to translate the key art into other aspect ratios and add in supplemental images that helped round out the tone and messaging of the campaign.
Website
Creating a dynamic experience
The final, and most intensive, part of the project was creating a separate website for the campaign. Along with a dynamic homepage that helped to guide users through the submission process, Girl Rising wanted to add bi-monthly updates where recent stories are featured. In order to do this efficiently I set up the website to utilize Webflow's CMS so that new submissions could be easily added by the Girl Rising team in a way that kept the website's visual style consistent. In order to help users find specific submissions based on country or organization I implemented a Javascript filter component developed by FinSweet so that users could search stories based on their tags.
