A conceptual poster campaign exploring human habits through repetition, typography, and uncomfortable questions that invite awareness and choice.
Project type
Academic / Concept project
Role
Visual Designer
Role
Editorial Designer
Tools
Illustrator · InDesign
Concept & system
Ask Why? is a conceptual poster series that explores human habits through repetition and direct questioning. The project uses simple but uncomfortable prompts to bring attention to moments where routines can still be questioned, emphasizing awareness as the first step toward change. The visual system is built on a rigid, repeatable structure. Each poster follows the same layout and typographic rules, reducing hierarchy through lowercase text and subtle variations between bold and italic. A halftone block partially hides part of each question, requiring a second look and reflecting how habits are often visible yet overlooked. A controlled colour system ensures consistency across the series while directly addressing the viewer.
The project draws inspiration from Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of liquid relationships, where connections are fragile, temporary, and easily replaceable. From this reflection, the metaphor is translated literally: if people are treated like objects, what if they came with a user manual?
The result is a small A5 editorial publication that adopts the cold, instructional tone of real product manuals to describe a person. The design is intentionally minimal and functional, using generous white space and a clean sans serif typeface to reinforce the instructional aesthetic. The instructions are deliberately incomplete and sometimes contradictory, turning the manual into a system that fails by design and exposing the impossibility of reducing human complexity to a set of rules.
