DCSF...

When I began looking for a competition brief to answer this one stood out to me straight away. It was to design an advertising campaign to highlight the dangers of underage drinking to 8-17 year olds. I thought that this would be really interesting and a big challenge especially considering the vast age range that the campaign was aimed at.

I experimented with many different ideas throughout the project but I kept finding that the ideas were only relating to one half of the age group. After asking many people who were included in the age range I came to the conclusion that the most successful way of appealing to the entire age group was to look at technology, in particular games.

As the brief stated that the campaign must not include shocking images I chose to look at retro 80's games such as pacman, tetris and space invaders.

This led me to creating this booklet which would be mailed to the target audience which highlighted the dangers of drinking but not in an obvious way. I chose to make a maze book as I felt it successfully related to the notion of losing control when drinking and quite literally making the recipient 'lost' within the book.

On the reverse of the book was a poster which again took a similar format to the games that I had been researching. I designed a game which was impossible to complete, again it enforces the message that excessive drinking can lead to you losing control and becoming lost. It also highlights the message that underage drinking has a strong correlation with academic failure.

I designed the visual style of this campaign with the intention that it could be extended to cover many different types of media. A teaser campaign could be created to accompany the direct mailers simply using the phrase "game over." I considered that this teaser campaign would be successful as it would make the target audience feel included in the campaign and almost like they knew the secret as to what the billboards were relating to.