This campaign confronts the influence of misleading and sensational headlines that often heighten public fear and division, promoting media literacy as an essential skill for navigating today’s news landscape. Created with a partnership with The Poynter Institute, MediaWise, the News Literacy Project, and The New York Times in mind, the system spans a newspaper print ad, billboard, web banner, subway cards, and animated motion advertisement. Designed to function effectively in both black-and-white and full-color formats, the campaign adapts across a wide range of dimensions and environments. Each execution introduces a fresh variation on the core concept; using shifting layouts, headline treatments, and visual pacing to keep the message unpredictable, eye-catching, and consistently unified across all applications.
Programs Used:
Adobe InDesign | Adobe Illustrator | Adobe Photoshop | Adobe After Effects
Everything is Scary
New York Times Op-Ed Ad Campaign
Advertising Design, George Mason University
The newspaper ad introduces the campaign’s core idea through a striking visual metaphor: a banana held almost as if it were a weapon with a shadow shaped like a real, pointed handgun, paired with the headline, “Everything is scary… when you don’t have the full story.” The image reflects how frightening headlines can distort ordinary objects into perceived threats, mirroring common fears around non-organic foods being treated as dangerous or unnatural. Though printed in black and white, the chosen subject matter establishes a signature black, white, and yellow visual palette that carries throughout the campaign.
Newspaper Print Ad
The web banner evolves the concept through a new visual: a hand holding a bluetooth speaker with the shadow of a pipe bomb cast behind it. This execution highlights how emerging technology is often framed as harmful or dangerous before being fully understood. By transforming an everyday device into something threatening through silhouette alone, the ad underscores how fear can be manufactured through implication rather than fact.
Web Banner Ad
Billboard Ad
The billboard centers on a familiar cultural fear with an unsettling twist; a candy bar casting the shadow of a hand holding a razor blade. Drawing from anxiety surrounding Halloween and food safety, the design captures how emotional headlines can amplify unlikely dangers into presumed realities. The large-scale format ensures the visual is immediately legible and impactful in public spaces.
Subway Card Ads
The subway card series presents a departure from the shadow-based visuals by using physical separation as a storytelling device. A bag of sugar pours downward into three powder lines resembling illicit drugs, symbolizing the fear surrounding sugar and health narratives. Each subway card reveals only part of the image, forcing the viewer to piece together the full message across multiple placements, mirroring how incomplete information can distort perception.
The animated ad brings the original banana-gun concept to life through color, motion, and pacing. Movement enhances the transformation from threatening to familiar, making the initial illusion of danger feel more immersive. By introducing animation, the campaign’s central metaphor becomes even more dynamic, reinforcing how emotion, presentation, and framing can influence belief.