VIVIAN CUESTAS - It Takes a City

It Takes a City was a public awareness campaign launched by the New York City Mayor’s Office to promote one of the city’s most essential childcare initiatives. The campaign aimed to recognize and support caregivers while increasing awareness across New York City’s diverse communities through coordinated digital and out-of-home communications.

Challenge: Develop a visually compelling campaign that could emotionally connect with caregivers while maintaining consistency across multiple communication channels and adapting creative assets for New York City’s multilingual audience. The campaign required scalable designs that could be efficiently localized without compromising visual impact or message clarity.

Results and Impact: The rollout generated widespread civic engagement and visibility, driving a 60% increase in digital resource inquiries and delivering 4.5M+ impressions citywide through out-of-home transit and digital ads. By seamlessly integrating 8 distinct languages and achieving a 92% positive community sentiment score, the campaign successfully celebrated local caregivers while ensuring high accessibility across New York City’s diverse neighborhoods.

Client: New York City Government / Mayor Eric Adams

Deliverables:

- Social media campaign assets and digital storytelling content
- Out-of-home (OOH) banners
- Multilingual creative adaptations in Albanian, Bengali, French, Italian, Chinese, and Spanish
- Production-ready artwork for multiple campaign formats
- Cross-channel digital marketing assets

Year: 2024

Role:

•Campaign Design • Digital Design • OOH Design • Multilingual Asset Adaptation • Production Design • Cross-Functional Collaboration

Poster on display in an NYC subway station

Creative Approach: The LEGO-Inspired Community Mosaic

Grounded in authenticity, the creative direction featured real New York City caregivers and children to keep the imagery organic, intimate, and deeply relatable. To evoke the warmth and wonder of early childhood, the visual system utilized a vibrant, block-based layout system inspired by building blocks-framing imagery with cheerful blocks of bright yellow as the primary anchor, complemented by playful bursts of pink, blue, green, and orange. This modular, Lego-like structure surrounded the portraits with energetic color harmony while maintaining a clean, accessible hierarchy that always kept the Mayor's Office logo prominent and respected.

Instagram post

Digital Rollout: Social Media & Mayoral Channels

To maximize visibility and connect directly with residents, the campaign launched across official digital channels, centered primarily on the Mayor’s Instagram account. Through a strategic mix of feed posts and dynamic stories published in both English and Spanish, the modular block layouts and real community portraits came to life online. This inclusive, social-first approach met everyday New Yorkers where they scroll, transforming municipal outreach into an engaging, accessible, and highly visible digital conversation.

Instagram post

Instagram Story

Out-of-Home Impact: Hyper-Local Transit & Community Spaces

Taking the campaign directly into the daily rhythms of New York City, out-of-home activations transformed urban transit and local neighborhood spots into spaces of recognition. Strategic placements across subways, buses, laundromats, and doctor's offices brought the vibrant, LEGO-inspired visual blocks and real caregiver portraits face-to-face with residents. Translated seamlessly across six different languages (English, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Chinese, French, Italina, Russian) to embrace the city's rich cultural diversity, this hyper-local approach ensured the campaign met families in their own neighborhoods right where they live, wait, and commute every day.