While I worked as an intern at Creative & Print, I had the opportunity to work on a campaign that has a powerful message that I strongly believe in. #NeverOK is a national campaign – several universities across the UK use this narrative as a method to promote respect and tolerance, and raise awareness of these issues on campus.
While ‘Never OK’ is a national campaign, each university has developed its own identity for print and digital assets. My brief was to create a visual identity for #NeverOK at the University of Reading, using both the University and RUSU logos to reflect that this is a joint initiative. This will then be the basis of all promotional materials used for this initiative.
As it was a University of Reading design, I had to consult the brand guidelines to ensure that the chosen colour palette was suitable. This was the first time I worked with any sort of brand guidelines, so it was a good experience picking suitable elements to match the design at hand. I chose the colours from the deep palette, and then picked 4 more colours with similar tones to match.
University of Reading brand guidelines – colour palettes for print and web
For the proposed designs, I worked with the Creative Director to come up with the idea to use a range of different handwriting from people around the University – students and staff, to stand against these main issues raised by the campaign: 'Bullying, harassment or discrimination; racial, homophobic, transphobic, or sexually offensive language; domestic or relationship abuse; any form of hate crime and anti-social behaviour’. From these main points, I then chose 9 words/phrases to make the focal point of each poster, making sure to cover all the core values of the campaign.
I then went round the office, allowing staff to pick a word that particularly resonated with them. I found it really interesting to see the sort of person that would choose each word - for example, sexism was picked by a man. These were then scanned in and vectorised, before being applied to a poster to pitch to the client.
I felt honoured to have worked on this project, as the message is so powerful and important. Having my handwriting on the 'Abuse' poster really hit hard, as it is a word I connect with particularly, so I hope that these posters and other future deliverables will be able to help someone. I am excited to see how this visual identity is applied across campus used to promote love and respect to all people.