Give the V a Voice
Social Campaign
Motion Design
Public Advocacy
Web Design
UX
Women’s health content is regularly suppressed or banned by social media platforms. In response to a D&AD New Blood 2026 brief set by CensHERship x The Case for Her, I conceptualised a taboo-breaking social media campaign united by a simple hand gesture, allowing anyone to raise awareness by sharing their experiences with women’s health censorship on social media.
Challenge
CensHERship want to create a collective advocacy and testimony movement that allows users to document and share their experiences, exposing the pattern at scale. As a socially-driven organisation, key challenges were a low budget and wanting to initiate conversations with major social platforms instead of putting them under the fire.
Insight
Women’s health censorship actively impacts public health by reinforcing a systemic bias against female bodies. This manifests in words like ‘vulva’ or ‘vagina’ being seen as taboo and self-censored with terms like ‘v-word’, on- and offline. Exposing the normalisation of these stigmas can serve as a key motivator to drive public participation.
Impact
Collaboration with public health figures normalises the use of anatomically correct terms and encourages women to share their intimate health experiences, united by a new hand gesture. Some posts will inevitably get censored, allowing documentation of more evidence with a simple webform and further fuelling public discussions.
Pitch Video
First campaign posts visualise real statistics to highlight the amount of insecurity women experience around reproductive health issues, which draws attention to the cycle of stigma around terms like 'vulva' and 'vagina' and initiates first conversations.
Key visuals include line-art illustrations representing real, diverse bodies and the use of black rectangles as visual censorship across their intimate areas. Together with a colour palette reduced to black, white and CensHERship pink, as well as typography coherent with their existent branding, These posts establish a recognisable visual appearance for all campaign content to follow.
Phase 1: Exposing Stigma
Further posts include bold words and imagery related to female genitalia, raising awareness, testing the limits of algorithmic censorship, and sparking polarising media coverage. Collaboration with public health figures helps reclaim 'taboo' words as normal and encourages women to share their intimate health experiences in uncensored words, increasing content about these vital health topics while building solidarity through shared experiences.
These posts are united by a new hand gesture, inspired by American Sign Language. Through repeated public exposure, the hand sign becomes universally associated with female health, making it easier to identify relevant content online while also serving as an empowering tool for people to initiate these vulnerable conversations on- and offline, even if they're anxious about finding the right words.
Phase 2: Public Participation
Posts contributing to the movement will inevitably get censored. To streamline the collection of this evidence in one place, I made a simple online form in Webflow. Based on user tests, I decided to split it into simple sections to reduce overwhelm. As the censored posts are clearly part of a bigger movement, it allows CensHERship to expose the pattern and scale of the problem with clear documentation and gain further media attention, driving real change.
