On what public-health design taught me about perspective, research, and making creative decisions with communities rather than simply for them.

The Challenge

Working alongside the University of Washington and Entre Hermanos, I helped develop creative directions for a sexual-health campaign intended to reach Latinx men who have sex with men in the Seattle area. The larger public-health goal was straightforward but significant: increase awareness and use of PrEP as a tool for HIV prevention.

Getting there creatively was considerably less straightforward.

Language, culture, sexuality, immigration concerns, trust in healthcare and the realities of how information moves within a community all affected how a message might be received.

The Opportunity

My role was ideation and creative direction, but the work wasn't developed in isolation. We created multiple visual approaches, brought them into focus groups, listened to what resonated and what didn't, and used that feedback to move the work forward.

Some directions were bold and provocative. Others leaned into humor, intimacy, relationships or personal agency. The images shown here are part of that exploration - not simply variations on a layout, but different hypotheses about what might make someone stop, recognize themselves and listen.

The Process

The process changed the way I think about audience.

In commercial design, it's easy to turn an audience into a demographic description on a creative brief. Sitting with actual people makes that abstraction disappear. Research becomes conversation. A creative preference suddenly has cultural context behind it.

And the designer's job changes from deciding what people should respond to into building enough possibilities that they can help tell you what is meaningful. This collaboration stayed with me.

Designing for people whose lives and experiences are different from my own did not limit the creative process. It widened it.

It reminded me that empathy in design isn't imagining that you understand someone else's experience.It's creating a process where you don't have to pretend that you do.