The Challenge
Flat-panel TVs tipping over causes thousands of injuries each year, disproportionately affecting young children. Sanus, a Milestone AV Technologies brand, needed to turn this serious safety issue into something people would actually engage with and share — not another corporate safety page that nobody reads.
Approach
I led the creative direction on this project within a larger agency team, handling illustration, visual design, and frontend development. The concept was built around a central character who serves as the user’s proxy — a guy sitting in his living room, unaware of the danger above him. Rather than listing statistics in a brochure format, I designed an interactive narrative where the consequences unfold around this character as the user progresses through the experience.
The illustration style was a deliberate choice. A photographic approach would have made the injury scenarios disturbing. The warm, hand-drawn aesthetic kept the tone approachable and shareable while still communicating real danger — parents would send this to other parents, which was the whole point.
Solution
On desktop, the site used a horizontal scrolling mechanic powered by CSS transitions and JavaScript scroll events. The illustrated scene moved laterally around the central character, who stayed fixed in the viewport. As users scrolled through scenarios demonstrating tip-over dangers, the character accumulated visible injuries, eventually receiving a cast. Each section functioned as a distinct scene — the living room, the emergency room, the statistics — and the horizontal movement gave the experience a storybook quality that matched the illustration style.
The data was woven directly into the illustrations. Impact force comparisons (a falling TV hits with 10x the force of an NFL lineman), injury statistics from the CPSC, and demographic breakdowns were presented as colorful infographic elements integrated into the scene rather than as dry callout boxes.
For mobile, the horizontal scroll was restructured into a vertical infographic. The same illustrations, data, and narrative flow were preserved, but recomposed for single-column reading. This wasn’t a scaled-down desktop — it was a considered redesign of the interaction model for how people actually use phones.
Clear calls to action — Learn, Take Action, Share, About — anchored the bottom of the viewport on desktop and served as the primary navigation, driving users toward the pledge mechanic and social sharing.
Results
The site was recognized as an Awwwards Site of the Day and accumulated over 3,900 Facebook likes — strong engagement for a corporate safety PSA. The illustrated approach proved that even compliance-driven content can be engaging when the design serves the audience rather than the brief. The visual language extended into Sanus’s broader safety communications and the site served as their primary consumer safety resource.
