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• Tackling climate change
• Love Camden website
• What’s On in Camden website
• Young People’s What’s On
• What’s On print campaign
• Where’s my nearest?
• Camden website
• My journey website
• Camden Voices
• Developments magazine covers
• Developments magazine spreads
• Developments exhibition stands
• Catalyst magazine: The covers
• Catalyst magazine: The spreads
• Young London website
• Meet the Family
• Seasonal greetings
• Guide Dogs website
• 7 Magnificent Marathons
• Healthy Eyes website
• Why Bother characters
• Why Bother website
• Rainbow Tours website
• Socitm website
• Blingin’ or Mingin’...
• Annual review
• The Royal Society main website
• Drink more water
• Drink More Water desktop application
•  

Developing the Why Bother characters

Creating characters that would be friendly and appeal to all ages.

Client brief

Macmillan Cancer Support needed a website for 7-16 year-olds to increase their understanding of cancer and its prevention and to offer support and guidance for young people with cancer and their siblings. The challenge was to communicate difficult, often emotional, messages in a friendly, non-scary way within a design framework to which this often-resistant audience group would warm.

Click on an image to see a larger version

Our response

We knew it was essential to steer well clear of a lecturing style and that our whole approach needed to communicate that the site is for young people and about young people.

We worked closely with an animator to help develop characters that would be ageless and timeless, appealing to both young kids and teens alike. We felt the best way of achieving this was to create a range of characters that were not scary in anyway – by making them half animal and half human. We wanted almost Ren and Stimpy character types, which crossed and appealed to all age groups.

Introducing the usual suspects Bob, Feline and Toast

In this way we could be more suggestive of anatomical things without having to be totally literal. We could moreover –  by making the characters quirky and slightly comic – create a warmth and friendliness with which users would engage. We felt that this would help to soften what is a very scary subject even for most adults, let alone young people.

Toast educating Feline about breast cancer, and Bob about Testicular cancer

It has been very successful and has survived even Macmillan Cancer Support’s major rebrand by Wolf Ollins. View the Why Bother website case study

Blob demonstrating that smoking isn’t cool