Project highlight

Positive Living BC

Nineteen years, one designer, and every piece of paper the place ever sent out.

Starting Point

A community HIV organisation, a bi-monthly magazine and no design department. Hired half-time for the magazine alone

Employer

Positive Living BC (formerly BCPWA), 2001–2020. Full-time within six months, at the board chair’s insistence

My role

Art director and production manager. Layout, pre-press, identity, and every printed thing in between

How the magazine came together

01 Make do –

Photography, scans and Photoshop

Every issue needed pictures, and the image budget was zero. So the images were mine: my own photographs, Photoshop and Illustrator concoctions, and scans of whatever was lying around. Including, once, a slice of Swiss cheese. Six issues a year, one designer, and a non-profit’s skinny budget turned out to be a surprisingly good creative brief.

02 Grow, shrink, repeat –

16 to 40 to 28

Sixteen pages, then 24, then 40, then back down to 28. Funding set the ceiling, and a volunteer pool of writers decided how much of it we could fill. Our editor was a perfectionist, and the magazine was better for it, so the copy that reached me was worth designing around. The grid bent without breaking. Canva, eat your heart out.

03 Get it to print –

Pre-press and printers

I’d finished part of a printing certificate and pre-press turned out to be my strong suit. My files went to the printer ready to run, and he never once had to call me for corrections. Before me, his pre-press department had spent so much time fixing incoming files that he was ready to stop working with the magazine. He stayed. Clean files will do that.

Cover of Living+ magazine, issue 26. A red painted AIDS ribbon with the headline "The vicious cycle of AIDS and poverty".

Living+, September/October 2003

Magazine spread from Living+. A black-and-white photo of a hand opening, with the headline "A helping hand" and a two-column article beside it on legal issues around supervised injection facilities.

Living+, January/February 2008, sample spread

Cover of Positive Living magazine, March to April 2019. A figure in red and orange with the headline "Terminal Dignity: Reaching the end of your life".

Positive Living, March/April 2019

Two rebrands, two brouhahas

First the BCPWA logo changed, and every piece of material had to follow. The new mark was a compromise, and I’ll leave it there. Then it all changed again, to Positive Living BC, and the magazine went from Living+ to Positive Living. Same drill, but 10 times louder opinions.

1. The original

Original BCPWA logo. An eagle with spread wings over a blue sky gradient, above the words British Columbia Persons With AIDS Society.

2. The compromise

Revised BCPWA logo, the compromise redesign of the arch mark

3. Positive Living BC

Positive Living Society of British Columbia logo. The words Positive Living Society of British Columbia in red and black, with a red ribbon.

Everything else

Posters, multi-page reports, health manuals, stationery, conference abstracts, banners, fundraising campaigns. At one point the organisation had about forty staff, and I was the only person doing this job.

Cover of the Healthy Living Manual, 2008. Two silhouetted people standing on a rocky shore at dusk, with the title in yellow and white.

Healthy Living Manual, 2008
Read the PDF (3.2 MB, opens in a new tab)

Poster for the AccolAIDS 2018 awards gala, Sunday April 22 at the Vancouver Convention Centre. A red geometric A on a gold background, with event details and sponsor logos below.
Cover of "20 Years of BCPWA". A numbered grid in purple and black with a swooping silver arch and the British Columbia Persons With AIDS Society name.

20 Years of BCPWA
Read the PDF (4.9 MB, opens in a new tab)

Shot by me. Said plainly.

BCPWA created a Positive Prevention Director position before anyone else did. He wanted work that didn’t flinch, so I found the people, found the locations and took the photographs. One campaign about sex, for HIV-positive gay men. One booklet about tattooing, for people in prison. Plain words, honest pictures. 

Four posters. One booklet. Zero stock photos.

Black-and-white poster of a man's torso wrapped in a towel. Text reads "Just like you, I go to the baths for sex. I have HIV. It's complicated. We need to talk about it." BCPWA logo at top left.

Just like you

December 2002: four posters and postcards, one message. HIV-positive gay men have sex, fall in love and take risks like everyone else, so we need to talk about it. This was one of the first prevention campaigns in Canada to include positive gay men in its messages. As far as photoshoots went: never forgotten.

“Just like you, I go to the baths for sex.” BCPWA Positive Prevention Campaign, 2002. Photography, design and production.

Booklet cover. A man's bare back in black and white, with tattoos in maroon and orange on the shoulder and between the shoulder blades. Text reads "Safer Tattooing. Protect yourself! You can get Hepatitis C or HIV from tattooing. Know how to protect yourself and others."

Safer Tattooing

Read the booklet (PDF, 1.7 MB, opens in a new tab)

A short booklet for Positive Living’s Prison Outreach Program, a collaboration between various departments and volunteers, for people who get tattooed inside, where there’s no studio and no sterile kit. Hepatitis C and HIV travel on shared needles and ink, so the advice starts from what’s actually to hand and covers the needle, the ink, a good day for a tattoo, safe disposal and aftercare. The cover uses color. Inside, the budget stopped at black.

Safer Tattooing. Prison Outreach Program, Positive Living Society of BC, 2015. Photography, design and production.

112 issues later

Issues 13 to 124, then the doors closed at the start of COVID. Pure print work won’t come back. But my habits will stay: make it clear, make it ready, make it with what you have.