The Life You Want

opportunity

Help MassInsight Education, a think tank aimed at sharing best practices among teachers, improve the scores of students on the standardized MCAS tests. Approach the situation gingerly, as MCAS carries a lot of emotional baggage. Appeal to 10th and 11th graders that are taking the tests in a sort of “study guide.”

Schwadesign solution

What started out as You Must Do It became The Life You Want – we recontextualized the anguish, the struggle, and the worry around performing well on the MCAS, and turned the tests into one small step on a very long ladder of success. We peppered our spreads with the visual and verbal vernacular of 14 and 15-year-olds – applying our research of hanging out with them, listening to how they speak, and reading what they read. We used grungy fonts, hot colors, and newsprint. We sourced illustrator James Kraus from Art Guy Studios to reiterate the story on the back cover, thinking that patience levels for our target audience can also be expressed in six cartoons, instead of six pages. Every 10th and 11th grader in the state of Massachusetts received a copy, and MCAS scores went up both years this was published. (Even the printer, a New Hampshire resident, thought his teenage daughter had something to learn from this story.)

providing

8pp tabloid lifestyle publication, 2000 + 2001.