Presenting The IFRC PS Centre’s updated brand guideline launched early 2022. The intention here was to work with the brand’s already existing visual identity while adding a bit of “lightness” to it. The result includes a new logo, 6 “dark” and “light” backgrounds, as well as Word and PowerPoint templates for the team’s use. It also includes a new selection of brighter, warmer secondary colors, a warm sunshine yellow, a pastel blue and a deep bordeaux color.

Worked in close collaboration with Jesper Ghule

This guide was created due to the demand for support from the Red Cross staff and volunteer, who have been at the front line these past years in responding to the global impacts of COVID 19.

The guide is a series of tips and exercises that can help in calming down when feeling anxious or overwhelmed wherever and whenever you are.

Emotions can be hard to put into words, let alone into images. Working with the Red Cross’ Psychosocial Centre (PS Centre), I’ve had to work my way around graphically explaining concepts like depression, attachment, grief, loneliness, anxiety or psychosocial balance.

I joined the Red Cross PS Centre during the COVID pandemic and have been helping them to communicate about mental health ever since. Illustrating to break the stigma around this topic and communicating about the complexity of our human emotions.

In period of war in Europe, the PS Centre asked me to communicate visually on four different topics. The aim was to produce four posters reminding IFRC staff and volunteers about best practices and giving them recommendations in times of hardship on their missions.

The topics are (1) Taking to children about war, (2) Setting up psychosocial support in a response to a crisis, (3) Supporting volunteer teams, (4) talking about mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies (MHPSSiE).

The challenge here was working with vectors on Illustrator as opposed to pixel based software. Vectors would make the illustration scalable ie. usable for print like handouts, posters, banners etc but also usable digitally for social media or web use. Illustrating with Illustrator needed some getting used to, since I’m usually a Photoshop or Procreate user, but I quickly adapted and I’m really happy with the results.

The posters are available HERE.

Healper is a rapidly growing Danish startup in the field of Mental Health. They offer, amongst other services, an online platform that matches clients to the right therapist, taking into account their needs and their specialization. The aim is to create an easier access to help and offer an alternative to the usual long and complicated processes of finding the right therapist.

This ease of access become invaluable in times when our inner resources and energy are at their lowest.

My part in this was to work on their visual identity and create a few illustrations. I wanted something gentle, soft and easy to look at and chose this watercolor art style along with a fitting palette of pastel colors. In my opinions, this makes the illustrations neither overly cartoony, nor too serious but rather offers a warm way to talk about deeper topics. Relatable and comforting.

Learn more about Healper here.

Each week, the PS Centre releases a “friday exercise” on social media platforms. The aims is to spreat awareness about mental health and offer small daily practices to help stretch, reduce stress and anxiety or simply creative ideas for self-care.

Here are a few examples, mostly for Facebook and Instagram but also for the official PS Centre’s website - Photographies from Jesper Ghule.

The FOCUS project is a holistic research proposal on migration and integration. This book offers a best practice guide and is the result of years of extensive study. “This is not a recipe book for ‘successful integration’, but rather practical guidance on how to engage a community and a society in making integration happen… The goal is to have people sit at the same table and take decisions together.” – Anouk Boschma, Technical Advisor at the PS Centre.

I am so proud to have contributed and brought this topic to life (visually). My work here was to create and apply a visual expression along the publication, this includes choice of font and color palette, info-graphics, illustrations, icons etc. The result’s is this fully layed-out publicly available 100-page document. You can find it on the PS Centre’s website HERE.

Challenges: It was initially tough to dive into such a complex project I knew so little about. Both the topic and the language used was extremely technical and that took some extra effort and dedication to grasp. That being said, the topic was so fascinating, and the colleagues so passionate, we had a great collaboration and created a great publication.

Special thanks to Anouk Boschma.