Giving young people the right tools to express their feelings.
Rainbows Ireland is a free, voluntary service for children experiencing loss following bereavement and parental separation.
It provides group support for children and young people throughout Ireland through a series of tailored programmes. They approached us to work on their programme for teenagers dealing with issues relating to bereavement or parental separation. Following the completion of that project, we were asked to design ‘Conversations with Children’, Rainbows Ireland's back to school programme to help children to adjust to life back in school after several months at home during the Covid-19 crisis.
Each programme deals with heightened emotions so the challenge for us was to ensure that the design was sensitive to the topics.
The Approach
Each programme is broken into a series of workshops working through topics such as how to help young people understand and name or recognise their feelings; that change can be overwhelming and to begin to understand the changes that have occurred and navigate through them and simple coping techniques to foster a process of coping, adjusting and adapting to what has happened in their lives.
Each workshop runs through a sensitive topic shared through a series of activities – and each activity requires a written and verbal response. During the process, they reflect on their journey so it felt a journal format would be the best solution - making each activity full of doodles and making the content easy for each young person to engage with.
The Execution
To help make the journal engaging for its target audience we worked closely with illustrator Aoife Dooley who created a suite of illustrations which fit each topic and activity.
With a mixed format of doodles, character illustrations with a range of faces to demonstrate different emotions and a bespoke font – the journal is brought to life and helps get the balance between making the information easy for the participant to understand but also dealing with the sensitivity of each topic.
Rainbows Ireland's 'Conversations with Children' programme is a resource framework that was developed to support children on their return to school as the COVID-19 restrictions lift. Each session in the resource looks at helping children digest what they have experienced during the last few months and gives them the space to begin to make sense of what has been happening and understand many of the feelings and emotions that they may have experienced.
Using the same visual styling as the teenage programme, this resource adapts the bright colours and doodle style to create a series of activities that engage its audience, encouraging them to express their feelings about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives.
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