Description:

Please Ignore It – The world’s first anti-awareness awareness campaign. A contradiction designed to be unmissable.

Created for Tourette’s Association of New Zealand (TANZ), this campaign addresses a common misunderstanding. Most people associate Tourette Syndrome (TS) with shouting offensive words – a symptom that affects only a small percentage. In reality, tics can take many forms: blinking, twitching, grunting, or repeating phrases. And while they’re involuntary, the reactions they attract are not.

Staring, commenting, or awkward silence may seem harmless, but they add pressure and can make symptoms worse. Through close collaboration with TANZ, we learned that the best way to support someone with Tourette’s is to do nothing – don’t react, don’t make it a thing, just carry on.

That behaviour change became the idea.

We used distorted, dynamic typography inspired by EEG brainwaves, paired with bold colours and shifting visual intensity to mirror the unpredictable nature of tics. The more we asked people to ignore it, the more they stopped to look.

For people with Tourette Syndrome, the message resonated. It didn’t ask for sympathy. It asked for normalcy. And for TANZ – a small organisation with a big mission – it created national impact with a clear, empowering message grounded in the real needs of the community.

By flipping the script on traditional awareness campaigns, ‘Please Ignore It’ encouraged everyday empathy and challenged people to rethink their response to difference.