Client: City of Edmonton
Agency: Berlin Communications
Art Director: Paulina Van Vliet
Awards: ACE 45, Poster (Out of Home Single) and Microsite
A pixel art maze made for the City of Edmonton, part of a youth gang prevention campaign funded by the federal Building Safer Communities Fund.
Rather than lean on fear, the brief called for a visual language of empowerment and choice, told through the gamified aesthetic teens already recognize. Jude built an isometric maze filled with small vignettes: constructive paths like drawing comic books set against destructive ones like graffiti vandalism, each choice branching toward a different future.
The maze ran as large format posters across Edmonton's buses and light rail stations (an estimated 70 million combined impressions), with QR codes linking to a playable digital version of the maze and a family/school resource hub. Both the print and digital campaigns won top honors at the 2024 ACE Awards (Poster Single, Microsite).
The layout draws on 16-bit overworld maps like Super Mario World: a series of visible paths, letting viewers trace a route toward good outcomes while steering clear of the bad ones, all without a single line of lecture.
"Jude was the perfect partner for this project. He was able to pack so much visual narrative into every pixel, weave them into a complex storytelling matrix, and turn what could have been a boring government safety message into something young people would actually want to engage with."
âPaulina Van Vliet (Art Director, Berlin Communications)
đšī¸ View the full project breakdown and high-res images at:
đ https://www.the-pixel-artist.com/projects/pixel-art-ad-campaign-building-safer-communities-edmonton-by-illustrator-jude-buffum
đ https://www.the-pixel-artist.com/projects/pixel-art-ad-campaign-building-safer-communities-edmonton-by-illustrator-jude-buffum
