Overview
Next Chapter was a group project in which my group and I created a mock campaign to promote equity and equality in education. This campaign strives to equip educators with the tools that they need to enable and provide young students with a more realistic understanding of the past as well as a better understanding of the present.
Team members: Jennifer Piccinino, Minh Tham, Genevieve Zanaska
Software used:
Adobe Illustrator, Procreate, Adobe Indesign, Adobe Photoshop
Prompt
Create branding and distribution material mockups for a campaign based on a social issue of your choosing. Research your target demographic to figure out what will be most effective in conveying your message.
Problem statement
Every year teachers are given a history curriculum to use in the classroom to use. These teachers are implementing very important building blocks to the story of history in the United States of America. While there are not many campaigns that directly target outdated history curricula, those that do exist and focus on equity in education are most successful when they have community supporters (i.e. public officials, and professionals within a relevant field), social media presence, and direct community outreach and involvement.
When analyzing the brand identities of successful campaigns, many integrate images and voices of real community members, bringing a human-centric focus to their mission/message. Campaigns that are seemingly less successful, tend to use political jargon, unapproachable information, and stock images, making their approach less impactful and neglecting the consideration of their defined target audiences.
research stage
As our group settled on our campaign topic, we created a survey to try and gather data about inclusivity in education. This survey was sent out to various educators, administrators, and those working in education in the Northern California school districts. When asked if they felt that an inclusive curriculum is necessary for a student's education, an overwhelming 97% responded yes. Our research concluded that there was a need for change in the current schooling system to integrate more information from different cultures, backgrounds, and accurate historical events.
Brainstorming Stage
In terms of branding and style guidelines, we looked at past and recent campaigns based around education, but the majority of them either came off as too corporate or too childish. We considered many different names such as Flip the Page, Turn the Page, Change of Plan, Two Sides, Lesson Learned, etc. But eventually, we settled on the name Next Chapter. This name carried the idea of a hopeful future/change in the way education would be perceived.
Establishing a Brand Identity
We went through many stages of logo iterations ranging from minimal designs with no text to different combinations of logos along with the text. We finally settled on a font called "Lunchbox" which carried a playful handwritten chalkboard-type effect. We later selected three different colors to represent the past, present, and future which were tones of dark blue, light blue, and green. We named these colors Book Blue, New Sky, and Field Trip. These tones of blue were to convey a calming feeling while also representing the share of information, while the green represented a fresh and alert perspective.
Mockups
Creating mockups for distribution materials was a balance between simplicity and elegance. Finding creative ways to utilize the logo and tagline was very important in creating effective and attractive mockups. After doing research on what popular items were used by out target demographic, we created these designs.
Distribution materials
Animated Bus SHelter ad
Trifold Brochure
billboard
MERCHANDISE
Bookmarks
Stickers
T-Shirts
Tote Bag
MUG
Lanyard
