THESE PEOPLE NEED A COW, NOT A CUP: HEIFER INTERNATIONAL

The first project for my VISC 402 class is designing advocacy posters for a specific organization. I chose Heifer International (http://www.heifer.org & http://www.heifer.org/beyondhunger), a world-wide organization dedicated to ending hunger and poverty through the sustainable means of donating livestock, water purification pumps, and other gifts. What I liked about Heifer International is the fact that it is an organization based on empowerment. They help communities and families by giving them a hand up, not a hand out. Heifer's recipients self-end their own poverty by leaving them with new hope, health, and restored dignity.

WATCH THIS: "A Cow Can Change Everything"

Before you go any further with your reading, check out their social sites (if you have some time):
www.facebook.com/heiferinternational
https://twitter.com/Heifer
http://www.youtube.com/HeiferInternational
www.flickr.com/photos/heifer - There are so many awesome pictures in their sets

Our homework was the weekend was research; we were to find out everything about our organization. Read, listen, watch, collect, write, and design: those were the tasks. And while Patrick's end result was hefty, it was worth my while. With all this new knowledge, I wrote a 16 page paper (for you academics out there who are impressed with the length, it's designed with A LOT of pictures) about my findings. In this paper we had to cover:

• Organization's overview (mission statement + history + approach)
• Areas of advocacy (hunger + education + need for medication + need for warm clothes + need for clean water + women empowerment)
• Target demographic (Who we want our posters to impact)
• Portrait of that demographic
• Visual Audit (organization's brand, logo, color scheme, typefaces

Based on that paper and any additional research we discovered, we designed a poster articulating Heifer International's brand as well as the ideas we had for our poster. Let me remind you that this poster is real rough, the benday dots are pretty uneven and some of the text layout needs work, but I'll preview it to you guys because you're so supportive with all this (I feel like I can really never thank you enough).