UC Students Design Poster, Newspaper Campaign
to Send Strong Smoke Signals

Year 2000 graduating seniors in the University of Cincinnati's top-ranked graphic design program hoped their designs would send strong signals on the dangers of smoking to students on the UC and Xavier University campuses.

Designs by five UC students (now graduated) are part of a poster campaign while other designs, ten in all, are part of campus newspaper ad campaigns to convince their peers to "kick some butt" and give up smoking.

Graphic design grad Robin Lenowitz, from Atlanta, Georgia, described her poster design, "I created a cartoon character named 'Larry Lung' because college students don't like to be preached to, so I decided to go with humor. He's smoking and looking really cool. Then, he's literally coughing up a lung." For her real-world assignment, Lenowitz called upon her real-world experience gained while working cooperative education quarters at, among others, Chronicle Books in San Francisco, Walt Disney Imagineering in Orlando, Florida, and Hunt Design in Los Angeles.

In addition to Lenowitz's "Larry Lung" design, a design by Karl Wick of Chardon, Ohio, was transformed into a "no-puff poster." It depicts a 1940s-era war plane dropping a cascading line of cigarettes in the manner of a World War II bomb load.

Up to 2,500 posters (500 of each design) were printed and placed in the student unions, classroom buildings, cafeterias and residence halls of the UC and XU campuses this fall, according to Kirsten Lupinski, director of the UC Wellness Center. (About 2/3 of the posters are hung on the UC campus with the remaining ones at XU.)

As part of the campaign, newspaper ads are running this fall in the UC and XU student newspapers. "Each week, a different design will run," said Lupinski. "At the end of fall quarter, we'll do a random-sample survey on each campus to see if the posters and newspaper ads were noticed and if they had an impact."

Among the designs for the newspaper campaign is one by Wick, where a dowdy, bingo- playing matron wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a grimace is smoking while the tagline sarcastically reads, "Smoking is sophisticated."

In tandem with the poster and ad campaigns, XU is producing anti-smoking commercials to air between movies aired on the campus residence halls network.

The project is funded by the Ohio Department of Health and Hamilton County's Tobacco Free Ohio Coalition to combat the rising numbers of student smokers. According to a 1999 study, the number of college students who smoke has increased from 22.3 percent to 28.5 percent over the last four years. Eleven percent of college smokers had their first cigarette and 28 percent began smoking regularly after entering college. After adolescence, the college-age years are the most likely time for individuals to acquire a regular smoking habit.