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This treatment will need to unify a series of key beats including: learner stories, Courserian and instructor highlights, social engagement prompts, blog content, on-site promos, email, promotion page, and a collection page.
This campaign launched at a time when hate crimes toward Asians were on the rise in America. Members of the API community were feeling fearful, isolated, ignored. Despite the anger, pain, and grief, these qualities are not what defines the API community.
The goal of this affinity campaign is to amplify API voices from our community, so our brand should be present but not take center stage.
I started by looking at the ways contemporary Asian artists were honoring their own community by using bold colors, patterns and collage to represent their cultural heritage.
I'm lucky enough to live in a city with a great Asian Arts Museum, so I spent an afternoon taking in the historical artifacts, crafts, and motifs found in the art of different Asian cultures.
We had an opportunity to shift from a narrative of hate and division to focusing on ways we could unite by promoting empathy and understanding. After thoughtful discussions with our API teammates, we decided to shine a light on the achievements and contributions of the API community by celebrating their boldness, spirit, and triumphs.
The key feelings of this campaign were strength and solidarity. We wanted API members of the Coursera community to feel seen, heard, and appreciated. Non-API members of the Coursera community would feel connection and cultural appreciation.
It was imperitive that the API community not be depicted as a monolith culture. Our campaign would be representative of the vast diversity within the API community, so I crafted a color palette that's bright, bold and highly varied to evoke the joyous tone of the campaign and pulled in traditional textile and craft patterns from across the diaspora.
I sourced culturally signifcant symbols of boldness, spirit and triumph from a variety of API cultural traditions. For example, a tiger can represent courage in Chinese culture and a banyan leaf represents longevity in Indian culture.
For the course collection, I constructed a 'tapestry' of patterns which served as visual metaphor for the diversity of content and cultures represented by these courses.
In order to create a meaningful and unique portrait for each learner, I researched which cultural items were symbolic within their heritage. For example, peaches represent happiness and prosperity in Korean culture and Lotuses are a symbol of enlightenment in Indian culture.
I drew inspiration from the tesselating patterns and aura-surrounded figures I saw in Asian arts when creating these portraits, framing each learner with the symbols in our C to create a sense of reverence and heroism.
Our copywriter, social media manager and I came up with some prompts to engage our community on social, asking them to reflect on their own boldness, spirit and triumph. I created a set of backgrounds for each pillar that our social media manager could use throughout the campaign without needing additional design support.
The achievements of API instructors and Courserians were also highlighted as part of this campaign. I used bold color combos to differentiate these portraits from our learner stories.
We consulted with the Asian Identities ERG heavily throughout the development of the campaign, and they loved this look and feel so much that they wanted to adopt it to replace the ERG's existing identity. I created additional assets like Zoom backgrounds, a new logo and self-serve templates for presentations and events to support our internal APHM celebration and their programming throughout the year.
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