African Advocacy Campaign

Slideshow

Your Mission

You will choose a cause to promote. The goal is to build awareness of the issue you have chosen.

Choose from these causes:

• HIV/AIDS awareness/prevention
• Literacy
• Low-cost housing for Africa
• Eco-tourism
• Malaria prevention
• Promotion of micro-loans to African entrepreneurs
• Bicycle donation program

These are other general topic areas which you can build on: arts and culture, conflict, economic development, education, emergency preparedness, environment, ethnic/social diversities, health, micro-finance, peace and justice, poverty, technology, youth. All of these themes must be represented with a child-like aesthetic as shown in the examples.

This is an awareness campaign. The goal is to increase awareness of the cause you’ve chosen. Your work would be distributed in schools, office buildings or outdoors. It needs to appeal to a young audience, so it should be attractive and informational. It should have a call to action such as asking for volunteers or donations. It could point to a web site with more information.

You want to give people a direct line from their donation to the solution of the problem. For example, $100 will buy one laptop for a child in the third world. Potential donors will be more likely to give if they know that their money will go directly to people, rather than a large organization with a lot of overhead. They want to know how much impact their money will have.

An Example

We want to avoid shipping anything costly to another continent. Here's an idea. There are millions of bicycles in Africa. They tend to break down. They get discarded easily because people don't have the tools, the know-how, nor the parts to repair them.

This is where you come in. Your cause is a bicycle depot. Rather than dumping their bikes on the side of a road, people would bring them to a depot. There would be youth there who would be trained to repair them.

They would take parts from one bicycle to repair another. Once a bicycle is ready, it could either be sold or donated to someone in need.

This program would benefit everyone involved. The youth repairing the bicycles would be paid. They would bring home money to feed their families. Others would get a bicycle for free or very little. The environment would even benefit from having fewer bicycles dumps.

Software Skills & Tools

Multiple named artboards.

We'll set this up in class. You're getting this one for free.

Live traced texture (subtle!)

You'll use a texture from a photo which you will Live Trace and colour to use in your work. See the samples on this page as a reference. Be subtle with this. Such textures can easily look out of place next to vector art. It needs to blend into the rest of your artwork.

Typography

You will create your title type on your own. You have the choice of drawing it on paper then using Live Trace/Paint. You could also simply use the pen tool to draw the lettering.

Other tools: creating text, creating type on a path, scaling and rotating type, spelling and language dictionaries, fonts, formatting type, line and character spacing, special characters, formatting paragraphs, line breaks.

Selected colour palette

By this, I mean that you should take care in selecting your colours. Feel free to use Kuler. I'd like to see the colours from your design in a colour group in the Swatches palette.

Drawing:

Drawing simple shapes, drawing with the pen tool, editing paths, specify direction line and direction points

Selecting and arranging objects:

Selecting objects, grouping and expanding objects, moving, aligning, and distributing objects, rotating and reflecting objects, using layers, locking, hiding, and deleting objects, stacking objects, duplicating objects

Reshaping objects:

Transforming objects, scaling, combining objects, cutting and dividing objects

How to get an A

You will be graded on:

The use of the tools listed above.

Make sure you read this whole page. Follow all of the Illustrator requirements.

The appeal of your campaign

Your message should entice people to give. Your design should also entice people to give. Your title needs to be punchy. Your colours and typography should be appropriate to your subject matter. Your layout should be well structured.

Compliance with guidelines on this page

Make things the right size and other technical specifications.

Deliverables

You will hand in the template file with all fonts. Do not outline your fonts.

Include a PDF of your work, so we can look at them in class.