Client
Free Vallejo is a campaign led by Million Hoodies Movement for Justice. Free Vallejo is a multi-racial campaign to end gun violence comprised of young people, survivors of gun violence, impacted families of police violence, and Californians who are coming together to hold the City of Vallejo accountable and demand that the City develop a safer and healthier community by addressing poverty rather than criminalization.
Job
Working with Dante Barry, founder of Million Hoodies, we started from scratch. After a 20 year old young man, Willie McCoy, was wrongfully shot by police in Vallejo California without any consequences, Dante and others wanted to start a campaign putting pressure on the local government to take action. After more and more police body cam footage was uncovered, they quickly found this was not the only example of abuse by the local police force. The campaign was going to be called “Justice for Willie McCoy”.
Strategy
We suggested the campaign be named “Free Vallejo”. This name would:
Allow the campaign to focus not only on McCoy but on the other cases of police force abuse
Create an action-oriented approach by highlighting the word “free”, rather than the end goal of “justice”
Make the intrinsic goal of the campaign to pressure the city of Vallejo to take action rather than to focus on one case
The next step was branding. We decided to keep it as simple as possible, and keep the color palette for Million Hoodies, being black, white, and red. We added a red circle in the ‘o’ of Vallejo to signify both the body cam recording as well as the violence of gunshots, both adding to the focus on police brutality.
From there we built and designed a “pop-up” website for the campaign.
