International Stuttering Awareness Day takes place every year on October 22. I like to plan an awareness campaign each time. In the past I’ve created audio podcasts, special Google+ Hangouts throughout the day, blog posts, and tweeting stuttering fun facts mixed in with a few silly, made up ones for engagement.
This year, I decided on creating a series of comic strips. I chose a few common stuttering misconceptions and added a one-panel comic strip to them. I wanted to use humour (my speciality) to politely inform and educate. The strip above is my favourite of the bunch. I posted the rest of my comics below.
Since my goal is to spread awareness, I designed the graphics to be viewable and shareable on social media networks. And since there’s a lot of noise on social networks these days, I opted for a minimal and straight-to-the-point design.
I also created one for the kids! Of course, they aren’t really on social media but this would be more of an offline campaign or B2B (speech language pathologists, schools, etc.) of sorts. The cartoon fox is Franky Banky who is the protagonist in my illustrative self-help book for my fellow people who stutter. So yes, my other goal is to spread brand awareness (hence the brought-to-you copy at the bottom).
The International Stuttering Association hosts an online conference every year in October leading up to International Stuttering Awareness Day. Head on over to isad.isastutter.org if you’d like to learn more about stuttering and what it’s like to live with stuttering. You can also check out my podcast, Stuttering is Cool ;)