Project: Design a Poster Promoting Alternative Holiday Gifts

This holiday season, you will be spending a lot of money on gifts for your family and friends, and they will be spending a lot of money on you. What if you used some of that money to help people in the developing world? During the holidays, Mercy Corps offers people a chance to give gifts, like using $70 to buy a goat for a farmer in Zimbabwe, $33 to purchase crickets for an entrepreneur in Indonesia, or $125 to refurbish a classroom in Somalia. To help promote this kind of gift giving, Mercy Corps is asking the GOOD readership to design a poster to help promote the idea. The money that could go to these alternative holiday gifts could improve lives and, in some small way, change the world. Your design of a compelling poster could help accomplish that. Design, at its finest, has a history of driving social change. We hope you can continue in that tradition.

the OBJECTIVE
Create a poster promoting alternative gift giving.

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the ASSIGNMENT
We're looking for a well-designed piece that encourages people to give during the holidays, and also expresses the impact that contributing some of these gifts to the developing world would have. We want to see something that might make someone change their minds about how they are going to spend their money during the holidays, because they can see the impact that their gift might have. You can do this with text, with information design, or with both. It's up to you.

the REQUIREMENTS
Submissions are due by midnight Pacific time on December 14, 2010. Please make your submissions 578 pixels wide by 900 pixels tall, and no larger than 5 megabytes. We’ll post all submissions here on December 15, 2010. Email your submissions to projects [at] goodinc.com. The winning entries will be selected by GOOD and Mercy Corps and winners will be announced December 17, featured on our homepage, and printed in the next issue of GOOD. We’ll send GOOD T-shirts and a free subscription (or gift subscription) to the winners. The winner will also receive a copy of The Mercy Corps Collection: Images From the Field, a collection of photographs documenting Mercy Corps's field work.

RESEARCH and INSPIRATION

Mercy Corps gift site has all the gift options and information about why giving should be so important at the holidays.

These Mercy Corps videos are also good examples of the impact these gifts can have.