Students Create Community Bike Safety Campaign

Bicycling around Burlington may be a little safer this season thanks to the creative work of a group of Multimedia & Graphic Design majors. The BikeSafe campaign, developed in Professor David Lustgarten’s design seminar, uses bus posters, bicycle hangtags, and a 30-second television spot to encourage better biking. Slides from the campaign have also screened at downtown Burlington’s Roxy Cinema.

The need for the public-awareness campaign first emerged in meetings of the Burlington Bicycle Council, of which Lustgarten, an avid bicyclist, is a member. “There’s a lot of public pressure to address cyclists breaking the law and creating dangerous situations,” he says, adding that, in advance of the current school year, local police had been planning to crack down more vigilantly on risky riding.

Lustgarten credits Brent Burdick ’06 (see his Student View Q&A) with creating the BikeSafe logo. Burdick says he “played around with a lot of different stuff” before he began focusing on turning lines into bicycle spokes around the words in the logo. He tried to make the logo accessible to a wide audience by avoiding a “busy” look. “I think it’s simple,” he says. “You can easily digest it. Simplicity is a big key when you’re designing something to reach students and children, but also parents and adults. The logo has got to cover different age boundaries and a couple of different social class boundaries. It’s aiming at everybody at once.”

Jeffrey Foran ’06 designed the poster, and the television spot was largely produced by Simon Mandanhar ’06 and Jack Kubera ’06, with Hiroko Takikita ’06 acting in the ad.

—EE