The Project
Despite Essex being made up of a diverse mix of race, religion and cultures, just over two per cent of Essex Police officers were identified as black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME). Just 77 or 2.5% of officers identified as BAME, compared to a population in Essex of nearly 7%. The brief was to design a recruitment campaign to create a police force that looks more like the communities Essex Police serves.
After extensive research from the team we found the common misconceptions and reasons as to why people didn’t see joining the police as a suitable job. These ranged from not thinking they was eligible to join the police, to the police having a bad reputation from previous generations of their family in other countries they have lived in.
We decided the brief would be to have a set of quotes to break down these barriers and let people know of the qualities the job has to offer.
The Design
My main aim when designing was to make these quotes relatable to our target audience. I wanted to steer away from the corporate style and have a funner fresher look to reflect the role. The quotes are all created to inspire people and attract them to the job.
We worked with CliQQ an Essex based photography studio to create some really powerful portrait photos of a diverse mix of people in the Essex Police uniform. They captured a range of expressions to highlight the real mixture of emotions that the job can offer. The career can be extremly rewarding at times but also comes with its tests so needed to show this in a set of 14 photos.
When designing the quotes they needed to have a personal touch. The audience really needed to feel that they was coming from the person in the photo. After many trials I took the decision to stick with this elegant but bold textured hand printed typography. It consisted of a mixture of custom fonts all manipulated to fit in together overlaid with a texture so it all come together as one quote. Creating little details freehand also gave the option to highlight certain words to draw the audiences eye at a glance. Adding a splash of colour behind “join Essex Police” then separated each advert so they was a little more distinctive.
The Result
A set of clean graphics that was used a cross a range of media including social media, posters, news papers, flyer, pop up banners and much more. I also created an overall design that incorporated all of the shots to be used where we needed to put out more information such as they flyers.
To accompany my designs a set of films were created using the same people and used my graphics to carry the brand across all media. It’s becoming more and more important as a graphic designer to create graphics that can be adapted for animation. It’s great to work with the in-house film team to get more of an understanding of this. The results can be seen below.
The results of the campaign are great and was nominated for the public sector campaign of the year at the PRCA DARE Awards.
