NHS Bolton
Campaign to relieve pressure on the NHS during winter
Created at
Future
Deliverables
Concept / Campaign / Website / Social media content / Press ads / Posters / Leaflets
Project
Think twice
Sector
NHS
Project information
Background
In a post-Covid world, the NHS was facing extraordinary pressure, especially through the winter months, when demand for urgent care rises sharply. In Bolton, local services needed to help people navigate their healthcare options with more confidence, so that A&E and GPs could focus on those who needed them most.
The creative challenge
The ask was to create a thought-provoking, visually arresting campaign that encouraged the public to pause before defaulting to A&E or their GP. It needed to raise awareness of alternative care pathway such as pharmacies, self-care and other local services, without sounding patronising or bureaucratic. Crucially, it had to work within NHS brand guidelines while feeling fresh, direct and impossible to overlook.
Creativity with character
The insight was simple: people often chose the most familiar service, rather than the most appropriate one. A sore throat could mean a trip to A&E when a pharmacist or self-care might be the better first step. The challenge was to interrupt that instinct and replace it with a more considered choice.
I turned that into the campaign line: Think twice this winter. Short, memorable and deliberately direct, it gave people a moment to reconsider their options before seeking care.
Visually, I created a confident, high-energy campaign system that broke away from the expected NHS look while remaining unmistakably on-brand. Bold black-and-white typographic blocks made the message unmissable; bright seasonal colourways, hand-drawn annotations and yellow marker-style highlights added warmth, urgency and personality. The crossed-out 'Think once' device reinforced the behavioural shift at the heart of the idea, don’t act on autopilot, stop, think, then choose the right place.
I styled and created the campaign assets as a flexible system, allowing individual messages to signpost different healthcare choices while retaining one strong, recognisable voice. The result was clear enough to navigate at a glance, distinctive enough to earn attention and human enough to make an important public-health message feel like a conversation rather than an instruction.
That was creativity with character, turning a complex service challenge into a bold, practical campaign that helped people make better decisions and helped relieve pressure where it mattered most.