Balancing emotional sensitivity with clarity at a national scale.

With over 12,000 public submissions, the experiences report documented the lived experiences of New Zealanders during the pandemic, and captured a wide spectrum of perspectives ranging from personal hardship to systemic challenges across health, education, and society.

The challenge was to translate the wide range of deeply personal content into a clear and accessible publication. The audiences included both the general public and those working within Government, requiring careful consideration to communicate complex narratives respectfully, while ensuring the people who submitted felt heard.

My roles:

• Developing visual design of report system

• Developing layout and typography approach

• Translating content into readable structure

Opportunity

The main concept surrounding highlighting people's experiences and locations was a way to make diverse voices visible, and generate empathy. The document needed a solid and clean system to effectively balance emotional sensitivity and clarity at a national scale.

The visual system expresses this concept through clean typography, and pull out quote styles with a map of New Zealand featuring a drop pin of where the contributor was located during the pandemic. Deep gradients provide an empathetic tone, while soft shapes give a compassionate sentiment to the document. Large expressive imagery supports the wide range of experiences felt in New Zealand during the pandemic.

Outcome

The final visual system for the Experiences Report extends beyond not only the suite of documents, but across social media and other collateral. Enabling the content to be emotionally engaging to the audience facilitates empathy. Communicating this information effectively is vital for future pandemic prepardness, and allows the people of Aotearoa to be informed on the wide range of topics covered, and therefore help to give them context when forming key opinions on the Government and their actions.