This project was for the Boy Scouts – Heart of America Council, as a part of their 2019 Annual Report, which is released in the early summer 2020. The HOAC Annual Reports share information with the public about finances, community service hours, leadership awards, and much more. This year I worked primarily with a writer and another art director from the Walz Tetrick creative team to bring this project to life. It was uniquely challenging, because the report was to represent 2019, but we embarked on it’s design after the Covid19 global pandemic had taken effect, so we had to adjust our strategy to accommodate for the unprecedented times and world conditions.
Strategy Change
Part of the lead art director’s original plan was to illustrate stickers to send in the mailed component of the report, but budget restrictions and pandemic conditions led us to change our strategy– we began to think in digital terms, primarily the social media that members of Scouting were likely to use, Facebook and Instagram. We enlisted a junior art director from our creative team and each of us illustrated an entire sticker pack in a style of our own choosing, but using the same color palette. These stickers were scout themes, but we illustrated them with the purpose of being used digitally, in social media stories and posts.
I used my ipad and Procreate to create the stickers on the brown backgrounds below:
Problem Solving
The lead art director on this account had planned for these sticker packs to be downloadable from the website, and then each would require a third-party app to apply the sticker to an image before it would be posted in social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. This would work, but it didn’t seem ideal to me, so I decided to do some research. I discovered that Facebook and Instagram source their stickers from Giphy.com, and that we could create an account for the Boy Scouts of America and apply for a “brand channel”, uploading our stickers (and applying the right hashtags) there so that users would be able to access and apply the stickers directly from Facebook and Instagram without the use of a third-party app.
→Click to view the Boy Scouts of America giphy.com brand channel
Animated Gifs
Since the stickers were now destined social media, some of them would be enhanced by simple animation. Using Adobe After Effects, and Photoshop, I began to create animated .gifs out of my sticker packs and some of the other directors’ stickers as well.
Sticker Performance
The stickers were very well received by the Scouting community, some gaining as many as 66,855 views in the first two weeks of being published on the new Giphy.com brand channel. The Giphy.com account I created for the Boy Scouts has 1.8 million views to date.
They are now available for public sourcing at Giphy as well as downloadable sticker packs at hoacannualreport.com.
Stories Video
To accompany our digital and social strategy, we decided to make this year’s video in the style of Facebook or Instagram “stories”. This video would be used on the website and would be posted in the “stories” on the Boy Scouts of America HOAC social media accounts. We wanted it to give a real sense of happiness, community, and family. We reached out to the HOAC Scouting community to get their photos from 2019 that represent “My Scouting Family”. Our writer created a short script and I began selecting images from what we gathered, trying to cover all the aspects of scout life and scouting activities. I then photoshopped each image, color correcting and cropping and mentally mapping out where to overlay text and stickers.
Next, I brought the photos into After Effects and added .gifs and stickers (sourced from giphy.com and some of my own design). I created little notes and hashtags to make each of the stories look like one that might’ve been posted, but added our video script in the same unifying typeface and style across all the stories. I created a phone “mockup” for the video and one of my teammates created the Instagram-styled account header to overlay on the phone. Last, we added a fun, approachable music track to complete it.
Email Motion Graphic
Rather than putting the full video into the emails sent to Heart of America Council subscribers, we decided to put a little teaser motion graphic into each email that linked directly to the Annual Report website, where they could view the video. I pulled type treatment from the video, type from the website, and one of the animated stickers together along with the Boy Scouts of America logo into Adobe After Effects to create this teaser motion graphic.
Graphic Design & Advertising 