Keep Cats In
A project to design an Instagram campaign that effectively communicates a social issue and message to the audience.
Solo Project
A solo assignment developed during my third year of QUT for unit DVB202: Visual Design for Storytelling in 2025, focusing on designing and producing an Instagram campaign that communicates a social issue and message of my choice.
The social issue I chose to focus on was outdoor pet cats, highlighting the environmental issues caused by them as well as the harm that can come to them by letting them roam. I chose this topic because I love cats and I strongly feel like the negatives of outdoor cats far outweigh the benefits. Ultimately, the goal of the campaign, Keep Cats In, is to bring awareness to the issues that outdoor cats cause and to convince people to keep their cats inside.
I went for a digital collage style with a combination of drawn artwork and photographs to give the campaign a unique style to stand out while balancing being eye-catching with readability.. I used my family's pet cat Zeph as inspiration for the main cat the campaign follows to create a narrative throughline.
Visual strategies used include a visual style that is a combination of digital drawing and digital collage to create an eye-catching and unique style to grab the audience’s attention. I also used strong borders to make sure the audience can clearly understand the visuals of each image. Typography focuses on being clear and readable over style and uses a variety of text sizes to emphasise the most important information quickly to the viewer. I also considered what column each post would appear in when posted on an Instagram account when designing each post. All posts will use the same style of illustration to connect each post of the campaign together. Images in the same post will also follow a similar composition and path for the eye to follow, for example aligned to the side or the centre or following F or Z patterns, to make it easier for the viewer to quickly understand the information given to them. Additionally, the caption of each post will end by emphasising the name of the campaign "Keep Cats In" in some regard to help tie each post together to the same campaign.
My chosen artistic medium was a combination of digital illustration and digital collage, combining drawings and photographs to create a unique and eye-catching visual style designed to grab the audiences’ attention while still being clean and understood quickly. To achieve this, each part of the collage has a strong border reminiscent of torn paper that’s been scrapbooked together, with shadows behind each border to help separate each part of the collage. Paper and noise overlays were added to each piece to help tie each full image together while also giving it a rougher and more printed appearance fitting the collage medium. The cats were illustrated instead of being images because I live away from my family’s cat, who is the focus of the story of the campaign, and it would be difficult to find cats performing the exact pose I needed for each image.
Progress Images
This shows some early sketches of each image as well as early mockups in an Instagram template.
