Icons For Awareness

Design Brief:

Design a campaign to modify a behavior or raise awareness about a social issue. This can be about gender equality, racial inequity, safety, health, career, social justice or any other relevant topic.


Designer Statement:

This project aims to shed light on a pressing social issue through visual storytelling. With a focus on typography, the poster highlights the alarming prevalence of toxic workplaces in the U.S., affecting around 30 million workers. Despite limitations on color use, the message remains clear: overworked employees need support for their mental health and work-life balance. Through this awareness poster, I strive to advocate for change and encourage dialogue around the urgent need for better workplace conditions.


Design Exploration:

For this project, I immediately thought about this topic because nowadays, there are so many jobs but many people are undisciplined and don't attempt to get a job so they never apply, leading to the shortage of employees for a certain workplace. This then results in employers not having enough applicants to hire and to help fulfill different positions at the job, making all the current employees liable to work harder in order to keep the business going. At first my idea was to have a hand controlling the man using the puppet strings and the marionette to control the worker. Then, I found that it was extremely difficult to work with a silhouette of an actual person and settled for the hand. I also originally wanted to do a business man silhouette of him yelling at the employee and the employee is on the ground crying but that can be seen as any other issue such as anger issues or verbal abuse. Overall, I liked how this turned out.


Finalized Design Concept and Exploration:

My final poster was printed out as a 24 x 36 and the 3 colors that were used were the basic orange color, black and white. I put the text "Don't let Control Consume Your Soul" and I feel like the message is very clear for what I want to convey to others that see this. It is an image of a man's arm and hand controlling the man sweating on the floor and getting him to work harder and harder until he collapses. I utilized both illustrator and Photoshop to merge the different elements together and the use of the Arial font really cleaned it all up visually.