Responses by Xavier Blais, copywriter and Maxime Sauté, art director, Rethink

Background: Everywhere in Canada and the U.S., except in Québec, the dominant language is English. In Québec, it’s French. With that said, most of the stuff Québecers end up consuming is still from an English provenance and background. So, we’ve been playing with this unique context in Québec by targeting French-speaking Québecers who want to learn English.

Reasoning: Every year, we try and present the benefits of learning English in a fresh and culturally relevant way. Here, we wanted to highlight the fact that English is a more succinct language, so it makes for shorter stories; and down the line, fewer trees cut.

Challenges: We had a hard time landing the gritty details of the execution. It was always clear that we had to show a comparison of both languages with books, but we spent a great deal of time choosing the title styles, color palettes, visual signatures, taglines—and also finding stories that were not only in the public domain but classics that had to be read in their original forms.

Favorite details: The fact that we were able to bring an insight that every francophone knows to be true—written English takes less space than written French—and present it in a simple and evocative way. We’re also happy to see that the concept also resonates with English-speaking audiences.

Anything new: We learned that print takes time. We did layouts after layouts, slept on it, did more layouts and came back to the idea in its simplest form. We also had to go through the strenuous ideation processes, juggle layouts for almost a year and see it pinned on the board every day.

Visual influences: By creating new, original and simple book designs, people identify these famous titles in a flash without having to rely on the copyrighted visuals. In the end, the challenge was to evoke the universe of these stories with only the use of typographic treatment inspired by the stories themselves.

rethinkcanada.com