Above is the poster that is designed to target injection drug users (IDU). Currently, the HIV alliance does not have any form of advertisements for IDU besides word of mouth.

With this design, I wanted to shock people with statistics because I thought that would be a good attention grabber. Once viewers are interested in the poster, it gives it a “call to action” feel. My hope is that an injection drug user would see this poster and decide that they should become more educated about the local needle exchange because they are directly affected by the information.

As far as design goes, I wanted a simple design so that viewers were not overwhelmed by clutter, but I made sure that the colors correlated with each other. The positive is red because it is inferring that the 9 characters are infected with HIV, whereas the white is not. The slogan “be the one that doesn’t” is supposed to encourage viewers to use safe injection practices. I put this in all capital letters in Helvetica font because I felt that it gave off the appropriate tone of unjudgemental yet it still calls people to action. I specifically designed the poster so that the eyes would move down the page to the real message. The “9 out of 10” is supposed to catch the viewers eye, and then lead them down to the message of being the one that does not get infected with HIV as a result of not sharing needles.

Since drug injection is a touchy subject, it was very important for me to appear purely informational, and not generalize the target audience by giving off a judgmental tone. I also made sure that I used proper language (for example, it would be completely inappropriate to say “drug users” because they prefer the term “people who inject”). Overall, the poster is intended to show viewers why they should inject safely, and that the HIV alliance is a place that can help them.

-Kelsey Wilkins

This PSA is designed to appeal to all viewers in the community. Needle Exchange programs are not only designed to help injection drug users, but also to pick up used needles around the community. According to the HIV alliance, they usually pick up an average of 30-40 needles per day.

This is our final multimedia project. It is intended to give information about needle exchange programs, but also show viewers the significant impact that it has on the lives of injection drug users. Special thanks to Randy Burnett and Jeff Nichols for participating in our interview!