Project

Haitees

Description

In the wake of the earthquake that hit Haiti early in 2010, I found myself wondering how I as a graphic designer, could do something to help the poor people of this faraway country. As a student, a small monetary donation was all I could realistically afford. I started to consider the ways in which I could raise funds specifically for this cause. After a few days of mulling it over, I decided to start up a website that sold tee-shirts for Haiti, and the next obvious step was to label it Haitees.

I was able to enlist the help of a couple of my fellow students, and we all spent the first month researching, organising and designing the site that would serve as the basis for this project. We used the shirt printing site mysoti.com to print out shirts, cutting out the need for printing our own shirts (a timely and costly endeavor that we had no way of funding) and picked out which charity we were willing to send the money to. The Red Cross, we decided, were the best equipped to put the donations to good use. The next step was to contact designers, illustrators and artists, both big and small, and ask them to donate their time and work to our cause. We had a great response and after much blood, sweat and tears we had haitees.com up and running.

We ran this project with a great amount of time and dedication for over a year, and in that time we were able to raise nearly £1,400 for the people of Haiti. There were plenty of ups and downs, and times were we thought of packing it all in, when the sales were down. It was well into 2011 when we got the figures back for 2010 and saw how well we had actually done. The help we received from our fellow creatives and of course, the people who bought the shirts made it possible for us to turn our effort and time into the sort of donation that we would have never been able to afford by ourselves.

Fore more information about Haitees, visit the website here.