The making of the No Nonsense Country project advertising
Preparing an advertising campaign of No Nonsense Country, a good social project. The idea of the project is to present a tool to people that they can use to fight a wide range of nonsense, from potholes to rudeness of store guards, from illegal parking to bribery. The tool is a website and an app where people can post problems so that knowledgeable people can help eliminate them.
And of course, we need to inspire people: come on guys, wake up, be active, change what you don’t like.
Discussing possible ideas with the art director.
One. Expanding personal space. A street is a part of your apartment. If something breaks at home, you fix it or do something about it. Maybe we can put typical household items on the street. The idea: we don’t park like that at my home. You can take pictures at my home.
Two. A couple of minutes of active citizenship a day, and everything around you starts working perfectly. Exercise your citizen muscles. Various exercises.
Three. City freaks and overly active old ladies have nothing to do now, since normal people are now in charge of improving their cities. If you are complaining, you’re not a freak and a whiner, you’re doing everything right.
Four. If you tap the button and report the problem right now, it’s going to be better next time you’re here. Can’t take pictures? It will be better next time.
Art director: OK.
Time to visualize the ideas. What looks good in text turns out to be difficult to show in pictures. Besides, the client recommended us to use the existing corporate identity and character, a person with a turned-on head. Hodgepodge. Searching for a simple, laconic and clear layout that would look nice on various formats (billboard, City) and could be easily extended. Like this.
And so on, with any text.
Art director: OK.
Or a different approach, with a slogan.
Art director: OK.
The client approves both designs but prefers the first one as more convenient and extendable. Coming up with a bunch of phrases on topics given by the client: illegal parking, rudeness, potholes, security guards, poor driving. Searching for the words and the mood.
Designer-2: We can use the legs of the person who’s speaking.
Art director: OK, but the em dash should be hanging. Also, add the studio’s copyright on all of them, a small vertical one.
The client approves the visual solution. Sketching different characters.
Trying them on the mock-up.
The client approves the characters and asks us to invent a way to show SMS spam. Drawing and deciding on the dialogues.
Secret advisor: The traffic inspector’s far shoe doesn’t look too confident. And his other leg is touching the edge of the poster. There has to be a margin, even if a small one. The hands have to narrow down to the top due to perspective (or at least not expand that much). As for the text, it’s important to avoid equal distances from the top and the bottom (as on the poster with legs). You need the answer to be a tiny bit closer to the question than to the bottom paragraph.
Secret advisor: The typesetting looks OK. In the one with the “lawn,” it feels like it’s the first picture again. As for the traffic inspector, I think that you can change the angle of the right shoe somewhat to make it less horizontal (that is, to make the shoe toe lower than it is now).
Secret advisor: You should clean up the noise near the text in the one with the traffic inspector.
Coming up with twelve dialogues with five characters on three media: billboard, Pillar and City Format.
Art director: The beads look horrible, otherwise it’s OK.
Drawing new beads.
Art director: The first one.
Preparing mock-ups for printing, making small adjustments: reducing the sponsor’s logo, replacing dashes in the text. Typesetting another mock-up for the CityBoard format.
