Act for the Act

Having been cornered by a good friend from college, Simon was introduced to the political ramifications of the scrapping of the Human Rights Act (HRA). After initial investigation it became clear that there was a lot more to the HRA than the negative press you read in the tabloids. With the obvious real benefits for real people that the HRA brings, we decided to help raise awareness of the other side of the story by getting involved with the Act for the Act campaign.

In super quick time, one week from brief, we've helped create the brand and the poster campaign to promote Act for the Act and their crowd funding site: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/ActForTheAct

The campaign aims to raise money to pay for a poster campaign, across the UK transport network (tubes and train stations) telling real people’s stories of when the HRA helped them.

The campaign has attracted the attention of Stephen Fry who tweeted about Act for the Act, and comedian Simon Amstell, so since then TTP and Simon H’s twitter accounts have had a lot more notifications than usual! #actfortheact

The team worked on several approaches but the selected design was by junior designer Jack Veitch who worked with Simon and the team to develop the branding for Act for the Act, the fingerprint icon and the tag line, ‘The Human Rights Act is for everyone’. Photographer Gabrielle Motola (link) will be taking reportage style photographs of the people from real cases, and Jack’s handwriting has been used to bring even more personality to the story.

Draft posters, using existing photos, have gone down really well and have been approved and widely circulated on social media.

Act for the Act founder, journalist Fiona Bawdon said: ‘To The Point did a brilliant job of taking what was only a very short brief and turning it into reality. It is clear how much thought and creativity TTP has put into this project, and having dummy posters at this stage has really given the campaign a boost. We are still at the funding-raising stage of the campaign, but The Act for the Act logo and message have already been seen by thousands of people on social media.’

The government's manifesto included a promise to abolish the current Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.

Hopefully our work will help to raise the profile of the positives of the HRA, and the understandable concerns being voiced. This Bill was expected to be included in May’s Queen’s speech, however it has now been announced that the government plans to consult first, before introducing new firm proposals.

We like to think that our posters may have had a small part to play in that.