In the spirit of giving a gift for the 2012 Holiday Season that had impact and significance beyond the gift itself, my team at Hyperquake sought to make our annual Holiday Gift a collaboration or benefit for a local non-profit.

We aligned on a partnership with WordPlay, a Cincinnati nonprofit focused on after-school tutoring for underprivileged students from underserved schools. WordPlay is following the model established by the author Dave Eggers’ 826 National nonprofit, which has a similar mission and utilizes fun, tongue-in-check ‘storefronts’ to help fund the work of the associated nonprofit work. For WordPlay, the accompanying storefront is the Urban Legend Institute. This store will be stocked with creative, fantastical merchandise that focuses on urban legends, both local and global, as a theme.

The poster below was the output of a collaboration between the participants of the WordPlay program and the designers at Hyperquake. The kids at WordPlay wrote a 'Winter Urban Legend' that we took and illustrated. The output was both a fun gift for our clients and a piece of pr and merchandise for WordPlay.

Hyperquake Design Team: Matt Barnes, AJ Mercer, Dustin Blankenship, Briana Arnold
2-color offset print on 100lb. French Dur-O-Tone Butcher Blue, 19" x 25". 2012.
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