Description:

Background:

Calgary Foundation’s Vital Signs is an annual report measuring the city’s quality of life, providing a yearly snapshot of where people's heads are at. The report is widely circulated with politicians, media outlets, corporations, non-profits, and Calgary’s general population. It’s meant to spark conversation around critical issues most relevant to city inhabitants, and inform donors about potential areas of need.

The Challenge:

2021’s report was a year like no other; our first year lived entirely through a global pandemic. Cases of COVID-19 continued to surge — as did the needs of many Calgarians. Amongst these needs, help with overcoming another year in isolation (i.e. Loneliness).

Our challenge became finding a design language that would allow the statistics to depict the deeper meaning of the story — life without social contact. We didn’t want to talk about the pandemic, we wanted to talk about what it meant.

Key Insight:

For many of us, 2021 wasn’t defined by what we had or what we did, but rather what we missed: Each other. It was the year we didn’t hold our parents, embrace our colleagues, shake hands, share hugs and affection with friends. It was a year without touch.

Solution:

By developing a compelling design language centring touch and fingerprints, we were able to demonstrate Calgarians’ shifting feelings about the physical touch of others; both as a moment of elation and as a moment of fear.

We leveraged the new meanings and associations we now have with touch and contact — from the longing absence of simple affection to the visceral repulsion we might now feel from a surface or object touched by many strangers — to frame the unusual context this year’s report has over previous.

The report features a black foil-stamped cover with a silkscreened thermochromic ink flood, activating and becoming transparent upon contact to reveal the foiled title. This brings a sense of immediacy and reality to the effects of our touch, and provides a tactile experience to contrast a year where most have been made virtual.