"We are committed to educate, empower and advocate for the Deaf community of India by providing quality services in an inclusive and enabling environment". Deaf Way Mission Statement
My association with Deaf Way was part of a volunteer program made possible by CUSO-VSO. The passion and heart shown by this organization was moving and the reason the scope of the placement was expanded to include software training and additional work with NAD and ASLI.
Brochure
A large part of Deaf Way's student body is deaf youth aged between 15 and 25 years. Deaf youth have an amazing ability to express themselves emotionally and artistically. We felt new students would be attracted to a brochure that mirrored those characteristics.
The brochure gives facility, program and service information offered by The Deaf Way Foundation and background infomation on the Deaf movement. Each section has a representative graphic with artistic flair; depicting scenes meant to stir emotion and spark interest in the content.
Event Banner Helen Keller Student Awards, 2008
The Helen Keller Student Awards, like their namesake, seek to celebrate those who have achieved excellence in spite of their physical disabilities. An annual event held at various locations across India, The Awards in Delhi are the largest in attendance, venue size and stage size. As the designer it was my task to create a striking stage banner — one nearly 30 feet (9m) long and ten feet (3m) high. Helen Keller, being blind and a deaf mute, relied almost exclusively on touch to communicate with the outside world. Visually, I wanted the banner to convey a tactile quality and incorporate Deaf Way's official colours, yellow and lime green.
Using Indian Sign Language to represent T, D, W and F (acronym for The Deaf Way Foundation), the background of the banner features expressive hand gestures. Various blending modes and opacities in Adobe InDesign CS3 created new colours by overlapping these hand graphics. The final background is a chaos of recognizable hand signs, simultaneously optimistic in tone and meaningful to its deaf audience.
Given the abstract nature of the background the title was given a more literal treatment. The banner would simply read, Helen Keller Student Awards with title characters much larger than the rest; to ensure the entire audience could at least read HKSA. With a low-weight serif typeface in mind, Warnock Pro Regular Display (designed for signage) was chosen, set in white and given a strong blue glow to make sure it didn't get lost in background.
Sponsor information added, the final PDF looked good on a 13" laptop screen, better on a 20" LCD screen and absolutely magnificent in the flesh on stage the day of the event. For more information, visit thedeafway.org's web archive.
