EU Global Gateway

Four real people. Four corners of the world. One institution most young Europeans had already written off. The design challenge wasn't awareness — it was trust. And trust doesn't come from polished campaigns. It comes from feeling seen.

The core creative challenge was an audience that had already made up their mind. Youth disengagement from EU institutions isn't apathy in a vacuum — it's a learned response, conditioned by years of campaign material that felt distant, bureaucratic, and unearned. Working alongside the EU team, I had to find a visual entry point that bypassed that reflex entirely. The answer was to abandon polish as a value. The art direction committed to a collage-based, street-level aesthetic: photographs sellotaped to surfaces, handwritten annotation, graffiti lettering, grunge texture, rough composition. Not disorder for its own sake — but visual fluency in the language of the people being addressed.

The stories themselves were the content foundation: an Argentinian video producer who relocated to Spain on the back of EU-established digital infrastructure; a Malaysian student on an Erasmus exchange in Berlin; an African doctor whose community received EU support during the COVID response in Jakarta; a Guatemalan coffee farmer sustained by EU agricultural partnerships. Each was a real consequence of EU global involvement, rendered invisible by the institution's own communication failures. The campaign's job was to make these stories feel human and immediate — not like case studies, but like people. The documentary video direction followed the same rugged grammar as the print work: handheld, unfiltered, street-level.

The full campaign funnelled toward a digital destination: a QR code on every poster and video asset directed audiences to the Global Gateway website, where the four stories could be watched in full. Beyond the stories, I directed a metaverse extension — a virtual social space structured around the campaign's four pillars: digitalisation, health, education, and climate. Each theme had its own 3D art exhibition environment, purpose-built to turn passive interest into participation. The throughline across every touchpoint — poster, film, screen, virtual space — was the same deliberate roughness. A refusal to look like the EU usually looks. Because looking different was the only way to make anyone look at all.