Blog

By Peter Yanefski – Strategic Communications Associate

This year, the Association is encouraging people to design their own awareness posters for Histiocytosis Awareness Month in September. We have opened up a contest to the whole community for a chance for your poster to be featured among our awareness kit materials!

I wanted to get people in the right mindset for designing a poster, so I am going to take this post to share some previous designs and break down some of the few requirements for the contest. So long as you meet these requirements – being an 8.5×11 size, including our shades of Royal Blue and Dark Green, histiocytosis mentioned, our site is written (histio.org) so people can learn more, and a space is left for our logo (we will place it in later) – you can think outside the box and design whatever else you like to share awareness. You can even submit more than one!

Let’s go over how some of the basics have looked in previous awareness posters.

Poster 1

This first poster meets the criteria of the colors, all around, and features both the full logo, and the histio burst. It explicitly states September is Histiocytosis Awareness Month (although your poster isn’t required to). It mentions histio specifically, in this case asking people if they know histio, encouraging them to know histio and within that asking for ‘No Histio’ to emphasize the world the Association envisions without histiocytosis.

It creatively uses the ribbon that contains histio, as part of the aforementioned Know Histio. And after all of that, it plugs the website, where people can find more information about histiocytosis.

Poster 2

This next poster is even simpler. Just including the royal blue, our website, a simple blue ribbon as part of a popular reference to these British posters from World War II.

If you’d like to make any popular references in your poster, that’s okay, just make sure it’s not to something copyrighted or trademarked, otherwise we won’t be able to distribute it.

Poster 3

This next one is more information heavy. It features the histio ribbon from the earlier poster, and the Know Histio phrase, again in this case being used as both Know Histio and No Histio. It even has the crayon markings alluding to the originally childhood focus of histio research. Although we know now that it’s almost as prevalent in adults. Your poster can even be fully drawn in crayon, so long as you submit a digital color copy to us as part of your contest submission.

Then, it lists out the main histio disorders of LCH, HLH, JXG, RDD and ECD and spells out the full names. You can use your poster to highlight any or all of these disorders specificially. If you have LCH and that is what you specifically want to bring awareness to, that’s great, and we’d love to see that.

Finally, this ends with asking people to learn more about each disorder at our website.

Poster 4

This final one was created specifically for last year’s ‘Aware in the World’ awareness month campaign. It continues to work as an evergreen poster because it shows that global support and a cure for histio is still what we aim for every year, even if it isn’t the theme of this year’s awareness month.

It features a map of the world, tied in with a large blue ribbon that makes the border of the map. Boldly calls out September as Awareness Month above the map, and the subtitle underneath has similar wording to our mission statement.

Finally, there is our logo and a callout for our website in the lower lefthand corner. Even though its off by itself, we always include that, so people who’s eyes are caught by it the overall design, know where to go for more information.

In your designs, you can feel free to use the histio ribbon, and the motif of Know Histio/No Histio or create your own riff on awareness for histio and striving for its cures.

In closing, I want people to know that histiocytosis is being shared, but also want yours or a loved ones own personal journey to stand out through your art.

Best of luck in this contest!