TDS Australia partnered with the Dalgarno Institute to design the visual identity and poster campaign for World Resiliency Day 2026, built around a single, unflinching idea: Fall. Feel. Rise.
The brief was clear. The Dalgarno Institute needed a campaign that did not flinch from the reality of substance harm, but also did not lecture. A campaign for the person standing in front of the poster, considering a way out of a feeling they would rather not have. A campaign that spoke to resilience as a practice, not a slogan.
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About World Resiliency Day
World Resiliency Day is a global observance founded by the Dalgarno Institute to position resilience as a key protective factor against alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, particularly among young people.
Convened annually with national and international partners across the demand reduction and primary prevention sector, World Resiliency Day exists to do two things at once. It raises awareness of substance harm without sensationalising it, and it builds resilience as the positive, protective alternative — the capacity to fall, feel and rise without reaching for something to skip the middle step. The campaign sits inside the Dalgarno Institute’s broader mission to make families, schools and communities safer, healthier and more resilient, and its message lands across school workshops, sporting clubs, community seminars and digital channels worldwide.
The 2026 edition needed a creative system strong enough to live in all of those environments — pasted to a laneway wall, projected behind a school assembly, scrolled past on a phone — without losing its edge or its compassion.
Design Philosophy
In public health communications, the loudest poster rarely wins. TDS Australia designed a system that earns attention through restraint, repetition and an honest emotional truth.
A single idea, stated three ways. The campaign is anchored on three words: Fall. Feel. Rise. That sequence does the heavy lifting. It acknowledges the fall, refuses to skip the feeling, and frames the rise as the natural — not heroic — next step. Every poster in the system either states this sequence directly or extends it into a longer thought: Fall. Feel. Rise. In that order. At your own pace.
Electric blue as a refusal of softness. The campaign palette is built on one colour — a high-saturation cobalt blue — set against deep black and paper white. The blue is deliberate. It is not the pastel, gentle blue of most mental-health and AOD campaigns. It is awake, urgent, almost confrontational, which matches the truth the campaign is asking the reader to face. The restricted palette also lets the system survive any environment, from a glass-fronted billboard to a wheat-pasted laneway to a graffiti-covered wall.
Pixel iconography as a language of interruption. Each poster pairs a bold typographic headline with a single pixelated graphic — a falling figure, a stopped clock, a crowd, a ripple — rendered in a deliberately low-resolution, almost 8-bit style. The pixelation is doing real work. It nods to the digital culture the audience already lives inside, it signals a glitch or interruption in the script the audience has been handed about substance use, and it strips the image down to a silhouette so the headline can carry the meaning.
Editorial typography that holds its ground. Two type voices share the system. A heavy condensed sans carries the campaign’s hard truths in oversized headline mode — EVERY TIME YOU NUMB THE FALL, YOU DELAY THE RISE. — while a more humane neo-grotesque handles the second wave of more reflective copy: One Step Forward Is Still Rising. The Pulse of Resilience does not ask you to leap. Just to move. The tonal contrast lets the campaign be confronting and compassionate inside the same visual system.
Storytelling Through Structure
The campaign is built as a sequence, not a single hero poster. Every execution is a step on the same path — from acknowledging the fall, to permitting the feeling, to making the case for the rise.
The system opens at the loudest end of the spectrum. Every time you numb the fall, you delay the rise. Substances skip the feeling. But feeling is the only way. It names the behaviour the campaign exists to challenge — numbing — and offers a simple, almost mathematical reason it does not work.
From there, the posters move into permission. You don’t have to pretend you’re okay. Fall. Feel. Rise. In that order. At your own pace. This is the campaign’s softer middle — an explicit invitation to stop performing wellness, paired with the reassurance that resilience is sequenced and personal, not a race.
The third movement is the rise itself, stated without triumphalism. The fall is not the end of your story. Feel it. Then rise. One Step Forward Is Still Rising. The campaign deliberately refuses the leap. It does not ask the reader to be transformed; it asks them to move.
A fourth strand of executions runs alongside the main sequence, addressing substance use directly. The calm is temporary. The cost lasts a lifetime. Substances borrow calm. Resilience builds it. It does not wear off. It waits. Avoidance is not a way through. You reached for something to feel less alone. It promises to fill the gap. It widens it. Did it work? These pieces work as standalone provocations and as a counterweight to the more affirming work, so the campaign holds both halves of the conversation at once.
A circular sticker mark — The Pulse of Resilience · Fall. Feel. Rise. · WRD — ties the system together across formats, doubling as a wheat-paste motif, a giveaway sticker, and an end-frame for digital extensions.
A poster system built to travel — across cities, formats and audiences — without losing its meaning.
The campaign was developed as a modular kit rather than a fixed deliverable. Every layout is designed to scale from A4 community-noticeboard print to large-format outdoor and digital out-of-home, with mockups produced across the full range of likely environments: scaffolding hoardings, light-box billboards, glass-fronted display panels, graffiti walls, transit corridors and indoor venues. Each headline can be paired with the relevant graphic and the campaign URL — worldresiliencyday.com.au — without redesign.
The visual identity also extends into adjacent assets the Dalgarno Institute will deploy through World Resiliency Week — stickers, social tiles, T-shirts and digital banners — all governed by the same palette, typographic system and Fall. Feel. Rise. anchor line. The result is a campaign the Institute’s national and international partners can pick up and run with in their own contexts, while keeping a single recognisable voice.
Result
TDS Australia delivered a campaign system that does the hardest thing a public-health campaign can do. It tells the truth, and it stays with the reader long after they have walked past it.
The 2026 World Resiliency Day campaign gives the Dalgarno Institute a poster system with the visual weight of a fashion drop and the emotional honesty of a public service. It refuses to numb its own message. It treats the audience as adults who can handle the fall, and it offers them a sequence — feel, then rise — that does not depend on borrowed calm.
It is bold, restrained and unmistakable. A campaign built, like resilience itself, one step at a time.
TDS Australia is a brand design and production agency operating between Sydney and Saigon. tdsaustralia.com.au
