Expose the Glow ignites a new conversation about sun safety
Expose the Glow, is a youth-facing UV safety campaign and interactive educational platform. It was created for skin cancer prevention charity Skcin.
Background
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the UK. Most alarmingly, melanoma is one of the leading cancers affecting young adults aged 15 to 34. And this is exactly the same demographic most exposed to normalised tanning culture. Because social media influencers, endless sun-baked reality-TV shows and images of looks-maxxed tanned skin, are targeted at them 24/7.
Skcin, the UK’s leading skin cancer charity came to Designhouse with a brief to engage this hard-to reach audience with important information they don’t know they need to hear. As a result Expose the Glow is a campaign identity and interactive classroom platform that talks with teenagers, not at them.
Process
The strategic starting point was a deliberate inversion of the conventional health education model. This is because traditional sun safety messaging has tended toward instruction and warning. The evidence base, and the lived reality of anyone who has interacted with teenagers tells us a different story. This audience disengages with health information because the framing places them in the role of the uninformed.
As a result, Expose the Glow was built around the opposite premise. Therefore it positions the young person as the expert, the investigator, the one with the critical eye. The campaign asks participants to examine TikTok and Instagram inspired content. This includes tanning routines, sunbed advice, and influencer-led narratives, and to classify what they see as myth or fact.
“Expose The Glow is bold, immersive and intentionally designed to meet young people in the digital spaces and visual culture they recognise and respond to every day. “
Kathryn Clifford, Co-founder, SKCIN
The design challenge was to make UV safety feel like a personal act of autonomy and intelligence, not an imposed health obligation.
Expose the Glow identity draws on Y2K visual culture. The outcome is bold, chromatic, and unafraid of noise. And the colour palette is deliberately vivid, drawing from the visual register of the social feeds the campaign is interrogating. In addition, the typographic system pairs expressive display weight lettering with the kind of functional, scan-friendly hierarchy that works at projection scale. A
folder and case file motif, alongside an enigmatic character in “Agent Ray”, guides the UX. All of which reinforces the investigative narrative and brings the story to life. The content has an engaging, tactile quality that translates effectively to the environment of the secondary school classroom.
Outcome
The platform itself is built for 16:9 classroom delivery. This gives teachers a structured, curriculum-compatible tool that requires no prior preparation and deploys in a single session.
Skcin’s reach into secondary school education means the platform can scale nationally. The embedded data capture framework, measures and retains knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, and stated intent to change. This is the hard evidence base that can inform future policy submissions and funder reporting with every session delivered.
“We are incredibly proud of what we have created together and grateful for the passion, collaboration and care Designhouse brought to every stage of the process.”
Kathryn Clifford, Co-founder, SKCIN
For Designhouse, the project is a clear demonstration of a principle at the centre of behaviour-change communication. Cultural credibility is required for success. This comes from a human-centred design process that understands its audience and works backwards from there.
A campaign that looks and feels like the world its audience inhabits has a fundamentally different chance of landing than one that does not. The decisions made in the visual identity of Expose the Glow, the colour, the Y2K references, the investigative framing, the deliberate borrowing from the aesthetic language of social media are strategic first, decorative second.
Expose the Glow is live and being distributed in schools across the UK now. We look forward to seeing it grow.
Find out more at exposetheglow.co.uk
written by Francesca Bern, Marketing & Communications Executive
Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.
