An illustrated and photographic story campaign for Ronald McDonald House Charities.

The Brief

RMHC had created a comforting dog character lamp for the children and families living in their houses. They wanted to make something of the characters and so we suggested individual house stories for each of the 7 RMHC houses.

To make the stories more interactive parents and children could enter their suggestions for the name of the dog nightlight, the characters to be created, street names within the story, and also a testimonial from parents to their children in the front of each book.

The Characters

The nightlight is a very stylised character and so gave a great base in order to think about what his “friends” might be like. He has a lot of personality and being an animal the natural progression for me was to think of what children’s favourite creatures and toys could be. I loved the idea of the children being able to give the characters names like they would pets.

The Campaign

The stories and the challenges faced by the families in the RMHC houses are very real and so we didn’t want to take away from that by creating fully illustrated books. Therefore we went with a combination of illustration and real photography; merging the make believe with the real world.

The campaign was a success and it was such a privilege to work on something that you know would impact the families in a positive way. There were numerous entries for the testimonials and character names. Each entry was then chosen at random to feature in the books.