See No Lead. Taste No Lead. Smell No Lead.
Awareness Campaign
Self-directed academic project
Tools: Paper,, Adobe Illustrator
October 2019
This was a group project, but it carried real weight. Working alongside two other students, I was tasked with designing an awareness campaign about one of the most overlooked public health crises: lead contamination in Newark's water supply. The problem wasn't new, but the goal was to make people feel like it was.
The campaign centered on a simple, blunt tagline: See No Lead. Taste No Lead. Smell No Lead. That phrase does a lot of work on its own. Lead is invisible in water and is impossible to detect with your senses, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. The repetition was intentional. It hits like a chant, like something you'd shout at a protest. That energy carried through everything we designed. We also handed out blank sheets during the presentation and asked attendees to respond to prompts like "Water is…" and "I want Newark to…,” and pinned their responses to the wall alongside our hand-drawn illustrations. Seeing people write things like "I want Newark to remember" and "community means united"made the whole installation feel alive in a way that a poster alone never could.
For the presentation, we built an interactive installation that put the issue directly in people's hands. We created three NFC-enabled boards, each with a colored square that visitors could tap with their phone. The red square linked to a petition to pressure city officials. The orange square prompted you to take and share a photo on Instagram. The yellow square directed you to a donation page. The idea was that engagement shouldn't stop at awareness. There had to be a next step built right into the design.
Visually, the campaign was clean and high-contrast of black, white, steel blue, and a pop of red. The typography was bold and unapologetic. The hand-drawn illustrations, including a faucet pouring a block of lead instead of water with "Clean Our Water" written above it, added a human, almost urgent quality that balanced the sharpness of the print pieces. Everything was designed to feel immediate, not academic.
Honestly, this one stuck with me. It's easy to design something that looks good on a screen, but this project had real stakes, a real people in Newark dealing with something that shouldn't be happening in the first place. When people started walking up to that wall and writing things down without being asked twice, that felt like something. That's when it clicked for me that good design isn't just about how something looks. It's about whether it can start a conversation.