Healthcare · awareness campaign
2021
Ribera Comic
The comic was born at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with children in hospital having a hard time and a hospital that, seen from their eye level, is a cold place.
A real campaign, made from the inside out: visual storytelling, illustration and final art for the comic, produced as part of Ribera Salud's communications team.
Ribera Comic
A one-minute comic for a lifelong habit.
Healthcare · awareness campaign
2021
A real campaign, made from the inside out: visual storytelling, illustration and final art for the comic, produced as part of Ribera Salud's communications team.
Challenge
Ribera wanted to build a bridge from the inside: explaining hand hygiene — and why that small gesture protects their grandparents — with a closeness the usual clinical poster can't deliver. The occasion was World Hand Hygiene Day 2021; the deadline, two days to have it finished and presented.
The brief carried an underlying tension: talking about a virus without causing fear, in the very corridor where fear already lived. The answer couldn't be more clinical information — it had to be a story a child would want to read to the end.
Strategy
A habit isn't imposed — it's told.
The strategy was emotional before informative: instead of listing washing steps, the comic gives a reason — the grandmother waiting for her hug. The information comes later, once the reader is already inside the story. Taking care of yourself stops being a hospital rule and becomes the way you care for the people you love.
The title does the rest of the work: one minute. A cost even an impatient child can accept, repeated as a promise — to protect you, always.
And there was a brand goal underneath: for Ribera's identity to stop being the institutional backdrop of a corridor and become the world where the story happens. The hospital speaking the child's language — not the other way round.
Identity
The comic was drawn entirely in Ribera Salud's palette: its corporate reds and blues build the city, the park, the grandmother and even the water in the sink. The brand doesn't sign the piece in a corner — it is the entire visual universe, and that's the connection: the closeness comes from the hospital itself, in its own colours.
On that base, the language is classic comics: clear panels, a protagonist at the reader's eye level and a sequence you can follow without reading the speech bubbles. The only off-palette colour is the germs' green — the intruders are intruders chromatically too.
System
From first panel to final art took two days: the campaign had a presentation date and it wasn't moving. Script, pencils, ink and colour were resolved in a single sprint — ten panels, one thread, and inside the story the real seven-step hand-washing cheat sheet.
The format was designed for its reading context: a pocket concertina that unfolds in the paediatric waiting room, with short waits and readers of all ages sitting with the child. An ending that sticks — and a habit that stays.
Applications
The comic reached the paediatric clinics of the entire Ribera group network, timed to World Hand Hygiene Day 2021 — a campaign documented by the client's own press.
The language didn't stop at the comic: the same illustrated system carried over to other dates in the group's health calendar, like the World Primary Care Day poster — 'Siempre cuidando de ti', always caring for you — turning a one-off brief into a voice of Ribera's own for talking to families.
Outcome
The comic was distributed across the paediatric clinics of the entire Ribera network for World Hand Hygiene Day, 5 May 2021, and the group's own press covered the campaign. Behance also records a third place in a national illustration competition.
Behind the small gesture — one minute of washing — sat a bigger message: taking care of yourself is how you take care of the people you love. At the height of the pandemic, that emotional connection between the child, their grandmother and the hospital was exactly what the brand needed to tell.
And it proved a healthcare identity can speak with warmth without losing itself: same colours, same brand — a different eye level.
