Covenant House
Date: 2023
Client: Personal Project
Type: Art Direction, Graphic Design, Product Design
Covenant House is a non-profit organization situated in Toronto, ON, with the goal of supporting the livelihood of children and youth at risk or already experiencing homelessness.
To reflect the organization’s unique and vulnerable beneficiaries, the art direction is centered around plasticine - a play material many children are familiar with. The identity focuses on the concept of playfulness and nostalgia, good memories, and a hopeful future.
Although the subject matter is serious, the project tries to avoid falling into the pitfall of “suffer porn” - using grim visuals of often people in harsh conditions to try and gather sympathies, which is a sound strategy on paper, but in truth, it has been overused to the point of having the opposite effect. Instead, by utilizing the metaphorical symbol of a home, the new identity wishes to portray more closely the children and youth’s hopes of an ideal home and the organization’s commitment to supporting those hopes.
The website is designed to be an informative journey. By presenting clear and informative figures, supported by a bright color scheme, the site gives potential supporters and donors a clear view of how their resources are being utilized, and which impact their actions helped to create. Frictions are also reduced in the process of donation collection so that users are more encouraged to take immediate action.
Plasticine is a material with a unique texture, and this created a unique challenge for the project. Extra care was added from the photography to the design process to preserve the soft, moldable, and three-dimensional qualities of the material while ensuring a uniform and consistent identity that the organization can use with flexibility.
*Link to online prototype