Optionz
and Art Shape worked as a partnership to produce these
heath advice posters for HIP, the Gloucester Health
Information Project.
This
community design project involved a professional
designer (Stephen Podolski) working closely with
staff and young people from the Optionz community
project in Gloucester to produce a set of materials
to help promote the launch of a new Health Information
Project (HIP). HIP is focused on providing young
people with high quality information on a wide range
of issues affecting or potentially affecting their
health, including smoking, drugs, alcohol, sex and
nutrition. There were two key objectives:
•
to ensure that the materials were attractive to
the young target audience
• to enable the Optionz community project
to play a large hands-on role in the design and
production of the materials.
A
number of short (two hours each), highly focused group
design sessions were therefore held to identify the
core messages that had to be communicated, and produce
some appropriate artwork. Stephen directed these sessions,
and helped with the manual tasks, but the visual ideas
were generated by the participants, who also produced
their own individual artworks. The core technique
used was collage (using a range of contemporary magazine
and advertising imagery) to enable ideas to be translated
into images relatively quickly, whilst building the
participants’ confidence in their visual abilities.
Once
the artworks were complete, Stephen took them away
and prepared them for printing in a variety of formats,
including A3 and A4 posters, flyers, business cards
and postcards. The work produced was of a high quality
and succeeds in drawing viewers in to explore the
detail and depth, thus making it more likely that
they will remember the core messages.
