A year of quiet alarm bells, designed in plain sight.
Twenty-three campaign deliverables across seven public-health moments — from Earth Day to World Cancer Day, Feb Fast 2026 and an ongoing Resilience Series. One client. One voice. One year of refusing to look away.
Case Study · 001 / 2026
Public health written in the margins of the calendar.
The Dalgarno Institute has been a constant for our studio since our earliest years — a client whose work asks bigger questions than most briefs will carry. In 2026 we authored the visual language for a year of cause-driven moments: campaigns built to live on social feeds, slide decks, policy submissions and the occasional billboard, but composed with the patience of something that deserves to be read twice.
The challenge, as always, is that nonprofit design is allergic to spectacle. Loud does not mean heard. So we built a system — typographic, tonal, rhythmic — that could carry cancer statistics, addiction data, resilience psychology and environmental science without ever flinching into sensationalism. Editorial restraint as a form of respect.
Earth Day 2026 — The Footprint Nobody Counts
For Earth Day we took three substances normally framed as personal-choice issues — tobacco, alcohol and cannabis — and asked a different question: what does the planet pay? Cigarette filters as the most-littered plastic on earth. Alcohol's water, grain and glass economy. Cannabis cultivation's energy bill. A trilogy of single-image essays.
"We wanted three posters that could live in a gallery, a classroom, or a climate submission without changing a pixel."
World Cancer Day — The Things We've Been Told To Relax About
Two of the most socially normalised substances in the country are also Group 1 and emerging carcinogens. For World Cancer Day we built a paired set — alcohol and cannabis — in the same visual grammar, so the comparison is inescapable without being accusatory. The copy is the citation. The citation is the copy.
"If the science is boring, that's only because we've been practising looking away for a very long time."
Design is how a nonprofit borrows credibility before anyone has read a single word.— From the brief · TDS Australia × Dalgarno, 2026
Feb Fast 2026 — One Month, Quietly Measured
Feb Fast is the country's best-known alcohol-abstinence month, and it works best when the rewards are specific. So we dropped the moralism and ran with the physiology: insulin sensitivity inside a month, REM sleep returning within a fortnight, measurable reductions in cancer risk factors. Three panels, one rhythm — built to share, save and screenshot.
"Abstinence campaigns fail when they sound like punishment. Ours sound like a receipt."
The Resilience Series — Eight Panels, One Quiet Argument
A long-form editorial series we've been building in chapters — each panel a self-contained argument about where resilience actually comes from. Not the Instagram kind. The kind you can sit next to on a hard day. The work moves between psychology, faith, refusal power and recovery literature — held together by one restrained visual grammar.
"A series you can read in any order and still arrive at the same thought: agency is a practice, not a personality."
Lifeline Awareness — The Number You Hope You Never Need
Two panels in support of Lifeline's public-awareness work. The data did the heavy lifting — one crisis call every twenty-two seconds; 1.5 million conversations answered last year — and we let typography carry the weight. Nothing cinematic. Nothing you'd scroll past. A pair of reminders that the service exists, that it is used, that it is needed.
"The only way to keep the number memorable is to keep the design from competing with it."
Policy & Editorial — News Without the Spin
A smaller, colder body of work — policy explainers, expert profiles and an editorial wordmark for Dalgarno's own drug-and-alcohol news channel. The remit here is different: look serious enough to be quoted, be plain enough to be read. Masthead first, infographic second, opinion last.
"Policy design doesn't have to be grey. It does have to be quotable."
Voices in Recovery — Shane
A two-panel testimonial series — one voice, given room. Recovery narratives are usually compressed into thirty-second video clips; we gave Shane's story the treatment an editorial profile deserves. Typographic portraiture, first-person framing, nothing to sell.
"The only promise a recovery testimonial has to keep is: this is what it actually looked like."
Credits & collaborators.
Client
- Dalgarno Institute
- Australia · Global
Studio
- TDS Australia
- Sydney · Saigon
Team
- Jessica Tavitian — Design Direction
- Victor Tavitian — Strategy & Operations
- Binh Nguyen — Graphic Production
Disciplines
- Campaign Design
- Editorial Systems
- Art Direction
- Social Rollout
