Less stock, more sharpies: How a co-created campaign took shape

Estate noticeboards are easy to ignore. Dense text. Official language. Very aged stock images with big red X marks over them. Messages stacked on top of each other until they all start to blur. So what actually makes someone look twice?

Cleaner, Greener Estates

Poplar HARCA's Cleaner, Greener Estates campaign focused on a practical and unglamorous topic - rubbish. The goal was to encourage people to use their bins properly, keep communal areas clean, and take care of shared spaces across housing estates.

Behaviour-change campaigns like this face a familiar challenge. Our environments are saturated with messages telling us to do better. Instructions stack up. Warnings blur together. Over time, even well-intentioned messaging becomes easy to tune out.

Setting the right tone

The strategy behind the campaign was rooted in listening before messaging. From the beginning, the focus was on tone. This couldn’t feel instructional or imposed. It needed to feel local, shared, and recognisable to the people who see it every day.

That’s where the idea of co-creation came in.

Co-creation in practice

Rather than designing visuals about the community, the campaign invited some of Poplar’s youngest residents to draw what a cleaner, greener estate meant to them. Trees, bins, flowers, people - bold colours, confident lines, zero self-consciousness.

My role sat between that idea and the final execution. I worked with the comms lead to create a creative brief for the children that was clear without being prescriptive. Enough guidance to give the drawings purpose and freedom to let them be what they were going to be anyway.

When the drawings came back, they had a kind of honesty you can’t manufacture. They weren’t trying to persuade anyone. They were simply showing care.

Image: The idea, in its original form, drawn by one of Poplar’s youngest residents.

From drawings to a visual system

From there, the work became about translation rather than transformation.

I took the original pen-and-paper drawings and built a visual system that could hold them together across formats. Posters and flyers for estates and community spaces. Social media assets. Newsletter and website graphics. Each format asked for consistency, but not uniformity.

That meant thoughtful layouts, restrained typography, and colour choices that nodded to our branding without competing with the artwork. The drawings stayed front and centre. The design did its job quietly.

Once everything was in place, the visuals started to feel instantly recognisable. You could spot them across different spaces and channels without needing to read a headline.

Image: The finished poster, adapted from the original drawings.

Why it works

The campaign didn’t rely on long explanations. The visuals carried the message in a way that felt natural and approachable.

What stood out to me was how effectively the artwork supported the idea of shared responsibility without pushing it. The drawings did what good behaviour-change design often does best: they reminded rather than instructed.

On a good day

Cleaner, Greener Estates is a good example of how design can support behaviour-change campaigns in a way that feels grounded and approachable. Moving away from stock imagery and towards co-created visuals shaped how the work was received and remembered.

On a good day, design creates a feeling people want to be part of.