Life can easily become overwhelming for young people especially if they are isolated and disconnected. In early 2019 a special group set out to create an initiative that would change this.
CHALLENGE
The Australian Youth Advocates for Mental Health (AYAMH) are a group of young people from across the mental health sector recruited by headspace National Youth Mental health Foundation. Their challenge was to design a national peer-to-peer initiative to shift the conversation on mental health for young people across Australia.
AYAMH brought us on board to amplify and shape ideas through a co-design process. Helping them find a clear direction forward.
FOUNDED IN COMMUNITY NEED
New research revealed that three-quarters of young Australians (74%) believe stigma attached to mental ill-health. So we sharpened our focus on stigma reduction, prototyping and pitching three concepts to the team. Together, we stretched and tested the prototypes, settling on a creative collaboration platform to demonstrate the strength of community care and the power of sharing a story with others.
MAKING THE INVISIBLE, VISIBLE
The chosen direction focussed on the insight that mental health can be difficult to understand as we don’t often ‘see’ it. We asked the question – how can we make the challenges of youth mental health more visible?
Visible is a campaign and digital exhibition, partnering each advocate with a talented young artist to produce a creative expression of the advocates’ real experiences facing a mental health challenge.
CREATING BRAND VISIBLE
We immersed ourselves in the diverse worlds of the AYAMH team, learning what they identified with and what inspired them. We developed design and creative techniques to create the vision for Visible, seeking validation of our creative concept with young people outside the mental health sector in both regional and metro areas.
We developed a simple, iconic logo – a representation of a spotlight shining a light on mental health. It also resonated with a key focus of the initiative – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The identity uses a bold heavy typeface, gestural brush strokes and a bold, punchy language. We worked with a young illustrator to create the hero campaign images which set for Visible with purpose and optimism.
Digital exhibition
Visible.org.au is designed as a mobile-first immersive exhibition space. The UX strikes a balance between access and discovery, enabling multiple ways to navigate through the site, with pages that reveal themselves as you scroll.
The Visible homepage acts as an entry point to the gallery and the individual stories contained within, with selected artworks on an immersive wall within an exhibition space.
The Expressions Gallery display artworks which are randomly loaded, allowing each artist to be featured equally and creating an ever-changing virtual exhibition.
Users can investigate each creative expression and discover the intention of the work. Scrolling reveals the narrative of each young person’s lived experience of mental ill-health, the observation of their creative collaborator, and the inspirational message they want to share with other young people. Storytelling brings to life the creative process of each expression through imagery and video.
Campaign
The campaign was launched across various channels, including Spotify, social media, display, native and TV. We created a campaign that could adapt to feel native in each channel.
AYAMH and Milo&Co. partnered with Avenue and Bel Giles on the creation of visible.
