Every year, the Chief Public Health Officer publishes an annual report on the state of public health in Canada. These reports raise the profile of public health issues, stimulate dialogue and ultimately aim to improve and protect the health of Canadians. The theme of this report was stigma.

PHAC hired Accurate as the creative agency to deliver on their requirements. This report, and subsequent public outreach products, deal with many complex and nuanced themes that affect Canadians. To facilitate our client’s input around the key messages and tone Accurate introduced a phase just ahead of concept development called ‘mood board studies’. These visual explorations present colours, fonts, patterns, and keywords—as well as different style options, photographic, and illustrative. We ask the client for their emotive response. Based on these responses, the tone of the products was created.

The chosen approach centred around highly visual, yet abstract elements. Because stigma is discriminatory at its core, we wanted the graphics to be inclusive, and to represent all Canadians. We began with the word stigma and rendered it using neutral dots—to represent the majority, and colourful dots—to represent marginalized groups.