By: Bernice Dominguez, Cipriana Jimenez, Evelyn Tsoi, and Jayla Walker
“Every minute, 47 people are trafficked, 47 unsafe abortions occur, and every hour, 13 people die to gun violence — that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Healthcare Postcards
Project Thesis
Emails and texts have become more of a nuisance than a pleasure in the average American’s life. More often than not, digital communications exclude the sincerity of a person’s message. There is nothing more stoic than a “bolded” call for action via text. Postcards offer a fresh, sincere change for such Americans.
Engrained with handwritten messages and beautiful, yet pressing graphics, receivers are truly inspired to take action. For the purpose of this project, we will focus on creating postcards surrounding the theme of healthcare within 6 different areas: human trafficking, gun violence, cancer early detection, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, and abortion. Healthcare is a nonpartisan, pertinent issue affecting every American, making calls for action personal yet universal.
We utilized Canva as our design platform due to its versatility and accessibility. Canva is a great platform to collaborate on, and its google draw style design process is easy for beginners and advanced users alike to utilize. In addition, the process for finding fonts and graphics was streamlined much more than Adobe’s process. We also incorporated Canva’s draw feature to create custom shapes, and unique designs for our pledge cards. Canva served as a great outlet to express our creativity without overcomplicating the design process.
Within our postcards, we utilized bold, bright colors and fonts in order to grab the reader’s attention. Our color palette centered around shades of black, yellow, red, blue, pink, and purple — a perfect blend of warm and cool colors that create a visually appealing balance. In addition, by integrating chilling images [Ex. an image of a child surviving cancer], we aimed to evoke pathos and thus inspire the reader to take action. We believe that utilizing basic clipart wouldn’t be impactful because people can’t form resonance with graphics, they can only truly develop resonance with real people. The graphics we chose in particular show people in their most vulnerable states with terrified looks and disheveled states. Our pledge cards located on the back of each postcard are rather simple, gathering key information and pledge amounts per week, month, or year. On every postcard, there are links either through text, QR code, website, or hotline for the reader to donate and support the causes at hand. By maintaining a simple, yet impactful aesthetic, we hoped to convey the urgency of issues regarding healthcare.
Every minute, 47 people are trafficked, 47 unsafe abortions occur, and every hour, 13 people die of gun violence — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Addressing healthcare means addressing the future of America’s well-being. With each postcard and pledge card at a time, we aim to raise awareness and educate the public on the utmost critical issues of our time. There is no guarantee that a reader will take action after reading our postcards, yet, we hope that we can impact just one life. We hope to encourage someone to seek early cancer detection and save a life. We hope to raise awareness about the signs of human trafficking. We hope that in everything a person does, they note the importance of healthcare and the urgency of addressing such issues. After all, our lives and health can’t afford to wait.
Communicating Change 
