When choosing a topic for my project, I wanted to highlight something that is part of everyday life; something that brought people happiness and that is sometimes misunderstood. I created a campaign to educate people about chocolate and its health heath benefits. We all like chocolate, but by educating people on the health benefits we all can find a new love for it and lessen our guilt when eating it.

My research included several websites where they explained the health benefits of chocolate, why and how is it good for you, its history and recipes. By doing this research I gained a lot of knowledge on the topic and got inspiration for design elements I applied into my design concept later on. For example, I learned chocolate first came from Central and South America. This made me decide on the colors and patterns I chose for this project. I wanted something happy, so I used warm colors. I also wanted to depict nature, since chocolate comes from trees, so I used different shades of green and nature like patterns.

Some the methods that applied to my project from this course were brainstorming and “content + context=concept.” This gave me visual ideas as well as a structure for the project, thinking not only about the design but what I wanted to communicate and how.

After learning the benefits of chocolate and the way it should be incorporated into somebody’s diet, I decided that I needed to explain in detail how this works. Chocolate is good for you, but not all chocolate is good for you. I decided to focus on what the benefits are, what type of chocolate is healthy and how to incorporate into people’s diet by creating an informational booklet.

Many people have a misconception about chocolate, so I created six fact cards that explain to the audience what myths and what are facts. These fact cards state the true facts about eating chocolate, making people realize that it is actually not as bad for your health as many people believe it to be.

Since the idea is that the audience eats healthy chocolates, I promote dark chocolate, which is the healthiest to eat. To motivate people to eat healthy chocolate I created a “Make your own chocolate” kit, where they can make their own chocolate at home knowing the ingredients that go in to it. This kit comes with a “make your own chocolate” booklet which it includes directions, recipes and ideas of what to add to chocolate to make it fun and more interesting.

I wanted this project to be inviting and visually pleasing, where the audience might want to take some of the pieces with them. I wish for the project to say chocolate right away, so used brown as one of the main colors for the project. I also used two types of font to create some hierarchy and make the type more visually interesting.

One of the fonts has much more structured and the other one looks more like a handwritten font, giving the project a sense of professionalism and also craftiness. I wanted the design to look visually clean, modern and structured to mimic the science behind chocolate (the health benefits) but I also wanted to depict earth, nature and crafts by using a handwritten font.

I believe that I accomplished what I set out to do. There was some editing done throughout the process, but I believe it made the project stronger. In the beginning I thought of doing a third booklet with the history of chocolate, but because of time and actual level of importance of this piece, I decided not to include it. Besides this small change, I carried out with my vision for the project from beginning to end. I have learned a lot about editing content, making text heavy layouts into more interesting ones without losing the message as well as establishing my own guidelines when working in my own projects.

CHOCOL ATEindependent project } Concept Narrative by Goizane Mullin