Social Awareness Campaign Project_NSPCC_SPEAK OUT

During my 2nd year on my Graphics Design, Illustration & Digital Media course, we were given the task to create a Social Awareness Campaign for a charity of our choice. I had chosen to base my campaign work on the NSPCC. Throughout the project, I had researched into the charity in great depth and carried out my own primary research to help aid my campaign project and the final artwork. I had experimented, sketched and created many great concepts, but I had refined it down to my best 2 concepts for the final artwork.

The concepts in these designs are to portray innocent children as playful dolls, like a childhood fantasy feel.  However the message opposes the entire idea of childhood fantasy.  When the viewer  up close to view the poster, they see a portrait of a dolls face, however I replaced the doll’s eyes with real children’s eyes.  The eyes give life to the doll.  Children here are portrayed as an inanimate object.  Children who are abused often do not speak of their abuse to anyone, either being afraid their abuser will find out or no one would believe them.   I gathered this from my research into child abuse.  The eyes are also said to be “the window to the soul” or the focal point of any individual.  Eyes are what we come in contact, engage and build comfort with.  This idea draws the viewer’s gaze towards the child’s eyes, so they make direct eye contact with the image.  This forms a communication between the viewer and the poster.

Below the eyes I also took away another focal point of the face, the mouth.  Once again back to the fact that “children don’t speak out of their abuse”.  Taking away their mouth physically takes away their “voice to speak out”.  It also creates a very dark and surreal negative look, opposing the bright childhood fantasy feel.  I placed the words “SPEAK OUT”, as a replacement to the mouth.  This draws the viewer’s attention towards this message. 

Finally I have created a little tear which runs down from the eyes of each doll.  Tears being linked to human emotion and human eyes works well.  The tears almost tell a tragic story, children crying in pain silently, although they appear happy on the outside, “as a doll”.  Dolls cannot cry as they are an inanimate object, so the tear also gives life to the doll and the eyes.

In conclusion I feel as though this concept works really well, it is simple and effective.  And communicate with the viewer on many levels as mentioned.  The viewer would hopefully raise their awareness of children abused not being able to speak out and help them “SPEAK OUT” by donating to help the NSPCC help the children.