Capstone Presentation Deck, and Presentation Speech

Presentation Deck:

CapstoneDeck.pdf

Download PDF • 9.44MB

Speech:

"Hi my name is Lacey Cink. I’m a graphic designer based in Austin, TX. I’m going to introduce my capstone project with a quick video.

*INTRO VID

I went to a Catholic high school, so I’m sure you can imagine what my sex education experience was like. Abstinence, a corny video about how teen pregnancy will ruin your life, and a single piece of duct tape that my teacher went around and stuck to each of our desks to demonstrate how you become dirty and less sticky (or useful) when you have sex. That was the first two days. The rest of the two weeks was spent on anatomy.

While abstinence is one option for teens, it’s not the only one. The problem with teaching just one method, is that you’re leaving teens at the most vulnerable time in their lives without the proper resources, instead of giving them a safe place to learn valuable lessons about how to foster happy relationships with future partners, themselves, and their own bodies.

Withholding information, won’t stop the teens who want to have sex from doing so. It’ll only make it more likely that they aren’t going to be safe. When they don’t get it from an educational source, they are left to turn to the media, parents, peers, or porn.

It’s not just a problem with my old high school. Over the years, I realized that it’s a problem all over the country. It didn’t matter what city or if the school was public or private, there is such a variety in what information we’re getting, where we’re getting it from, and when we’re getting it—5th grade on a one day field trip in Florida, 6th grade in Texas filled with graphic birthing videos and STD scare tactics, 7th grade in Pennsylvania with the old school take home crying baby doll as form of birth control, 8th grade in Connecticut from football teammates, many in 9th grade like me in South Dakota, & one, who went to a Catholic school in Puerto Rico, didn’t have it at all.

I could share anecdote after anecdote because sadly everyone I’ve talked to—from friends to classmates to my barista asking me what I’m always working on—has an experience of a fumbled sex education. That’s why I wanted to do something about it.

So let’s go back to the beginning. My capstone project actually started in another class in this Master’s program, called Experimental Interaction or Creative Coding. We had a project brief where we were supposed to create a service, good, or company that protests a problem using creative code.

So I decided to design a poster ad campaign for a sex education company of health instructions like how to use a condom, pregnancy test, and Plan B. Then I redacted different areas, so it made it hard to read all of the text clearly.

*POSTER VIDS

To create these posters, I used the p5.js editor, which is a javascript library, to program how each one would be distorted randomly with code and included a headline: “hard to be safe with distorted information.” Here’s a little look at how these programs run when the distort button is pressed repeatedly.

I reran the programs until I was happy with how it looked and saved them into these poster designs.

I was on the phone with a friend telling her that I was struggling with what to name this company. She mentioned playing off of 'The Birds and the Bees' and I said to her, 'I didn’t want to dance around the topic with euphemisms. Sex isn’t a dirty word.'

Not only is that where the name came from, but also the voice for this project. No agenda pushing, no flowery language—just information.

Like a straight-shooting older sibling that has all of the answers, I wanted to cut through all the BS and talk directly to teens.

All of the resources I’ve read through have either been filled with cutesy metaphors, are trying too hard to be hip, or feel too sterile and clinical.

*PROTOTYPE HOMEPAGE

To build out the branding, I prototyped an accompanying website. Here is the homepage.

I used hover effects, a bright gradient as a backdrop, a custom font, short punchy copywriting, and thin-line illustrations, to keep it fresh, engaging, warm, and most importantly educational.

*PROGRAMS PAGE

To give viewers an understanding of what would be included in this comprehensive program, I laid out an outline of the topics that would be covered in each grade. This program would be every year from 6th-12th grade. These conversations need to be talked about early on and then built upon year after year.

For example, consent is in both the middle school and high school sections. It can start as hugging or someone touching your hair, and then you can build that to sexual consent.

*SURVEY

I also created a Sex Education and Mental Health Survey to give out on the first day of the program to get feedback on what teens would actually find useful to learn about. I included questions like: ____

*RESOURCES PAGE

Aside from the program itself, I wanted to give teens the tools to empower them to make the choices that are right for them, so I built out a resources page with articles covering a range of topics.

Sex health isn’t the only aspect of sex. Mental health, your relationship with your partner and peers, and your self identity—also come into play here.

Let’s say you’re working through anxiety, in an emotionally toxic relationship, feeling pressured by people you think are your friends to be cool, or struggling with your body image, you are less likely to make healthy sex decisions.

So, I broke up the topics into 3 sections—sex health, mental health, and healthy relationships—and created an article page for each one to show what these pages could look like.

*BIRTH CONTROL PAGE

I started with a birth control page. Did you know that there are 18 methods of birth control? I sure didn’t when I decided to illustrate them all. I went through pages of resources to slim the information down into digestible bits and used language that teens would understand.

*ANXIETY PAGE

Then a Stress vs. Anxiety article page for the mental health section.

*TOXIC RSHIP PAGE

and a Toxic Relationship page as well. Repeating the same illustration style and copywriting voice throughout.

To pair with this and further develop the brand voice, I created a mockup of what the Instagram page would look like. Social media is another great access point to getting information across to this demographic, so I mixed in branded educational posts like these, which pull some info from the article pages with illustrations and tweets that touch on the topics without being as information dense as the branded posts.

So why sex ed?

Sex education in America is often agenda-pushing, incomplete, or in some cases non-existent. The variety in what teens are being taught, who is teaching it, and when they’re being taught it often puts teens in situations that they aren’t safely prepared for.

I never thought I’d talk extensively to my professors about sex health or get critiqued on condom illustrations in class for grad school, but I feel so strongly about this topic for a wealth of reasons.

Mostly though, because I personally, along with the rest of us who have ever been a teenager, never got the sex health information that would’ve established a strong relationship with myself and empowered me as a young woman.

It’s an issue that bleeds into every single relationship—teen relationships, adult ones, friendships, the relationship with your body…

Women, and minority women especially, are unfairly bearing the weight of the lack of information more greatly.

So what next?

My goal is that it becomes a useful tool for accurate information, sparks healthy conversations, and turns into a fully built out program taught in schools and organizations. I’d love to see this project grow into including experts like OB-GYNs / primary care doctors / urologists / child psychologists / therapists / relationship coaches / LGBTQ+ youth specialists / people specialized in working with sexual assault and sex trafficking survivors.

I really want a diverse range of voices involved, so that they are getting every perspective available.

And my ultimate dream would be having this program come into my old high school to empower the future generation.

Thank you!"