Social media consultancy - Let’s Read Asia, The Asia Foundation
Part-time Social Media Consultancy at The Asia Foundation, San Francisco, January 2022 - January 2023
About Let's Read Asia
Let’s Read Asia, the concern of an international non-profit organisation called 'The Asia Foundation', works to build a world where curious and educated readers create thriving societies. Let's Read draws on the Asia Foundation's 18 offices in the region and deep ties in local communities to build a digital library of relatable, local language books accessible to all children. Their goal is to nurture reading habits that enable children to reach important developmental milestones, families to share stories that affirm their culture, and communities to flourish and grow inclusively.
Celebrating Women Creatives of Let’s Read Asia
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, pencil sketches
During my first year of studying in a master program full-time in Sweden, I worked with Kyle Barker and Ritica Lacoul as a Social Media Consultant for Let's Read Asia's headquarters based in San Francisco. We met up remotely for content planning, copywriting, designing, and illustrating visual assets for a few social media communication campaigns in my months of part-time work with them.
I am really thankful for Kyle and Ritica’s enthusiasm to have me onboard despite the challenges that come from hiring a full-time student 9 hours away.
We referenced the audience personas and brand guidelines closely and brainstormed creative direction for a few campaigns. I was involved in the following projects:
I proposed this series of social media posts for Let’s Read Asia’s Facebook page to celebrate all the female writers, editors, and illustrators contributing their skills and talents to children’s books.
The goal was to increase awareness about the backgrounds of an often underrepresented group of creators for many of these books written in underrepresented languages. It was also meant to bring a sense of community and engagement on the Facebook page to help create variety and contribute to organic engagement.
To share these creators’ authentic voices, we conducted interviews by sending out questionnaires to female writers, editors, and illustrators in the various regions where Let’s Read Asia operates. We got their answers and compressed them into bite-sized copy on the carousel/gallery posts. I complemented these with whimsical patterns and motifs, simple illustrations, and relevant imagery that all cater to the needs of the brand guideline.
Values4All Sri Lanka
Tools - Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, pencil sketches
My job was to promote these books through a total of 10 posts in an engaging way.
Values4All is an online platform developed by The Asia Foundation, Sri Lanka, to promote social cohesion among young people through three complementary projects which are; Shared Values, Our Stories, and #StrongertogetherSL. Through 10 new children’s story books, Values4All aimed to encourage values of compassion, honesty, peace, respect, and tolerance in children.
My job was to promote these books through a total of 10 posts in an engaging way. I followed a creative brief from Kyle, took advice from Ritica, and incorporated their feedback into the final copy. Kyle initiated the creative direction for the series and helped edit the captions. Meantime, I solo-ed the graphics, and copy for this series. The goal was to create engaging, intimate and novel ways to use the Facebook image templates to communicate news about these books that compels parents browsing Facebook to interact with them.
My experiment to develop content that parents would interact with is how the spiral-bound booklet format to promote books for each value came to life.
Brand Extension - Doodles
Tools - Adobe Illustrator, pencil sketches
I came up with sets of keywords for each genre of books published on Let’s Read and doodled variations of them.
When creating different external communication materials, Kyle and Ritica want to incorporate doodles that align with the brand for Let’s Read Asia. They usually have done this with stock vector art, but they wanted a set of doodles that constitute what Let’s Read Asia wants to communicate in a consistent and aligned way. Based on this creative brief, I came up with sets of keywords for each genre of books published on Let’s Read and doodled variations of them.
The process started with building up a list of keywords for which communicators at Let’s Read Asia could want a doodle.
The next step was to make some sketches for these keywords and pick out the ones that tie well into the brand.
Finally, I took the selected sketches and vectorised them on Adobe Illustrator. Once all of them were complete, I shared them as EPS files. The idea is to have them in a selected brand colour but be able to change colours as and when needed.
