The Fire Prevention Division of the NVFD works to prevent fires by doing routine inspections, investigations, constructions and educating people in the community. While the public education programs for elementary school kids and seniors have been effective in the past, the forms of communication they use to reach these demographics don’t work with the given target market of students aged 16 to 25. They have virtually no previous interactions with this age group and have no idea how to properly inform them on fire safety issues, which discourages the department from trying to reach out to them.
MAKe Studio (Michelle Viet, Amanda Wong, Kathrin Teh) was tasked with creating a campaign that would reach this target audience and resonate with them in a way none of the previous NVFD campaigns have ever done.
We began by brainstorming different campaign ideas and ways to capture the attention of the young demographic, and eventually settled on a unanimous decision to pursue an approach personifying the fire.
Once we had the idea down, we started on the character design for our mascot, Freddy the fire. All three of us completed a series of sketches and brought them together to decide on which one would be the best to use.
The next step was deciding on the creative direction and copywriting. We decided to go with a bold and bright colour palette to draw people in, along with a cartoony, playful character design. The target demographic is very responsive to cute imagery, as they grew up with cartoons, anime and comics being a part of their culture overall. To balance this, the copywriting is more tailored to be slightly edgy/trendy, using colloquialisms such as “cancel culture” in addition to shorthand texting for words such as “pls”.
In areas frequently visited by this demographic, such as public transit, bus shelter and library/school posters are an effective medium for campaign awareness.
We also wanted to focus on social media, as it’s the best way to interact with the age group we were given.
The team worked collectively on concept development, the brief, and ideation as a whole. Personally, I was in charge of designing the posters with additional input from my team members. I also wrote all of the copy included in the campaign.
I believe that I did the best I could on this project given the circumstances of remote work. I am proud of the copywriting I came up with and satisfied with the end results of the project overall. Despite not getting to work together in person, I loved working with my group and believe we synergized really well together! We all did our share and were very professional when it came to providing feedback on each other’s work.