Live brief - health and hygiene posters

Recently, I was commissioned by a local primary school to design a series of health and hygiene posters, encouraging pupils to stay clean and wash their hands regularly. With recent events, all schools have been left with a number of new guidelines and precautions to follow. It’s a very confusing time for young children, especially with all of the new rules. Therefore, I needed to use my illustration abilities to simplify these guidelines into a child-friendly format. The already existing ‘wash your hands’ posters needed updating with more relevant information. The new posters would be displayed in classroom corridors, toilets and the front entrance to the school. Therefore they needed to be bright, colourful and visually engaging. The information and imagery needed to be as precise and clear as possible.

I planned to design four different posters, tackling a range of issues. I used the current educational guidelines to decide what subjects to cover:

• Importance of washing your hands

• Always use soap and hot water

• Cover your nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing

• Talk to your teacher

Once I decided on the topics, I began working on the imagery. I decided to stick to a simple illustration style, using friendly school characters as the main subjects. This way, children could put themselves into the characters shoes, following the rules and actions more easily. I even illustrated the same school uniform as the pupils.

Character design

I played around a lot with composition and layout. Initially, I designed the posters as portrait, however I soon realised that this wasn’t working with the imagery. Instead, I switched to landscape, which was more suited to the sizing of the illustrations.

Portrait poster

After consulting with the school, we decided that some of the imagery were not in keep with the current educational guidelines. Originally, the characters were washing their hands with bars of soap. However, schools are currently advising children to use soap in a bottle. Although I had to refine these posters slightly, I learnt a great lesson. Before working on a project, it’s important to do your research and read the brief throughly.

Whilst I was refining the imagery, I also made some changes to the text. The information on the posters was quite lengthy and over-detailed. Therefore I opted for simplicity, using clear and catchy titles. This way, children could recite the information more easily.

Original poster

And here's the final pieces...

Illustrations in the classroom corridors

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project. It confirmed my passion for children’s illustration. It was great to gain real experience in designing for children. I hope to be given more opportunities like this in the future.