In Chicago, there are agencies who continuously accept tobacco companies as clients, using their staff to help sell cigarettes to a younger market. As a group creative director at an agency in the same city, I felt this acceptance by agency staff goes against everything my generation fought so hard to prevent. As a city, we've come so far—through education, publicity, even becoming one of the first cities to ban smoking in public establishments—for the health of all people.

I couldn’t just stand there and watch my colleagues use creativity to help people smoke, let alone convince the younger generations to start. I wanted to do the opposite: bring the original fight against smoking back to help save the next generation. Additionally, as someone who lost loved ones to emphysema after decades of smoking, I wanted to stand for something: to use creativity and design not to promote smoking, but to prevent it.