Dom's Designs
Poster designs raising awareness and support for those struggling with mental health.
Young designer Dominic O'Brien created a series of posters focusing on the themes of mental health and raising awareness as it is something, "extremely important" to the designer. He specifically believed the university environment needs awareness and support for mental health illnesses and issues. O'Brien felt the medium of poster design, "is an accessible way to spread a message. It’s versatile in a way that it can be placed pretty much anywhere." The target audience is university students at UON (University of Newcastle) who may be feeling scattered, flat, broken or other emotions due to mental illnesses and are not sure what to do. O'Brien's posters provide information on where to reach out and contact information for support at UON.
The posters follow a monochromatic black and white colour palette with simple lettering and typefaces which assists in maintaining the integrity of the words being communicated whilst using kinetic manipulation. Additionally, the designer wanted to create a design that was tonally appropriate for the subject matter as he wanted to, "express the themes maturely" and "didn’t want a “cheesy” design, especially when it came to designing primarily using text."
His posters express the feelings one may be experiencing because of mental illnesses through kinetic manipulation of the typeface. The first in the series 'scattered', expresses how individuals can feel all over the place and uneasy. O'Brien 'cut up' the letters of the word and had them literally scattered across the page in different sizes and warped shapes. The poster is extremely dynamic and the letters taper into a point at the bottom leading the viewer's eye to the message and call to action in the bottom left corner. this
In his second poster 'flat', O'Brien literally flattened out the word and warped the typeface to extend backwards, like the word has fallen flat on its back. I particularly like the use of negative space in this poster it feels as if it extends into a void, and creates a sense of loneliness for the word.
The third poster 'broken', has broken up the word and repeated letters across the page in a staggered way, almost glitching across the page. O'Brien uses a variation in text sizes to fill the page and it has a jarring effect on the viewer. A trail of letters tapers down toward the call to action in the corner, similar to the first poster, expertly drawing the eye to the helpline.
