I helped Crittenton Children's Center turn a clinical framework for helping traumatized preschoolers into materials a stressed-out teacher could use.
Role
Principal
Organization
Orange Flame Design
Trauma Smart is Crittenton Children’s Center’s program for early childhood trauma, part of Saint Luke’s Hospital System in Kansas City. TraumaSmart offers a training curriculum for parents, teachers, and caregivers so that a four-year-old carrying something heavy gets met the same careful way everywhere. The clinical grounding is real, built on the attachment and self-regulation research a couple of trauma specialists had published.
I worked with Crittenton to produce the vast array of materials needed to make the program usable in a classroom. After working through a brand system, we produced a treatment guide, a set of art cards, a series of short training videos, and a brand anthem video.
The art cards were branded but purposely imperfect. I drew the majority of the assets on an iPad, creating everything from icons used on a routine chart to hidden image worksheets.
The treatment guide was the bulk of the project. It runs past 229 pages, English and Spanish throughout, and covers the whole range from the clinical conceptualization of the program down to how to make a calm-down box or a bubble recipe.
Trauma Smart still runs at Crittenton. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation later backed an effort to carry the model into Head Start programs across Missouri.
A food bank site from spec to comps. The whole thing started with untangling an information architecture where everyone was sure their page was the most important one.
