If a friend talked to you...

My call to action is for people to think about how they treat themselves. We demand respect and love from the people we choose to be friends with, but we don't always hold ourselves to the same standard in how we think and feel about ourselves. 

Many calls to action can be in your face in bold type declaring something like STOP this or DO that, but I thought this required more subtlety and introspection and I wanted the typography to reflect that. So I chose a pretty standard font, nothing out of the ordinary and I steered away from all caps or boldface.

I used italics to draw attention to "friend" and "you" and to create a parallel between them, hopefully conveying the idea that you are your friend - or at least you should be.

When I picked this call to action I thought about what image I wanted to use to convey it. I figured that a mirror can symbolize our interactions with ourselves pretty well. The water in this picture acts as a mirror and shows the girl's reflection. I wanted to use that idea of reflection in the typography as well so I put the text on either side of her figure in similar configurations with a line of large text and a line of smaller text. 

The key difference between the two sides is that one is black and the other is white. I did this to show how we treat our selves and how our friends treat us are different and sometimes even complete opposites.

The sentence is a little long and I didn't want people to just rush through it without stopping and thinking so I broke the text up into four parts to create pauses that make people think about each phrase in the sentence and ultimately the whole message.

Lastly, I used different sizes of text throughout to draw emphasis to certain things. I chose to make "the way you talk to yourself" the largest to emphasize that phrase because the whole point of the message is to change how you treat yourself. Likewise, I made the final phrase, "would you still be their friend?" the smallest to emphasize it as well. Things that are very small can have just as much emphasis as things that are large. This last phrase is the most crucial I think because it really gets you to think. It poses a question that really gets you to apply the message to yourself. I chose to emphasize it by making the text small because, again, I wanted the message to be subtle. Because its small, its almost like a whisper, just a gentle push to think about it rather than a huge, all caps, boldface shove to take action. There's nothing wrong with that sort of call to action but it has its place and I don't think in this context it would be as effective.