Last year I put the Guardian in Good Design’s ‘Top 10 Good Bits’ of 2012 for their award winning (and rightly so) TV ad ‘The Three Little Pigs’ by BBH. It seems there is a pretty special client/agency relationship going on because they have pulled off another creative triumph, this time in the form of a series of ingenious print ads by illustrator Noma Bar for the ‘VoiceYourView’ campaign, the Guardian’s first U.S. only ad campaign.

VoiceYourView is an outdoor campaign that uses Bar’s illustrations to depict both sides of hot political debates in the US, with the over-arching theme being individual freedom versus government regulation. The campaign focuses on four key debates: internet privacy, gun control, women in the military and the use of condoms in the adult film industry. Using a lovely graphic technique called ‘ambigrams’ each illustration shows one side of the issue in question when viewed one way and the opposing side when flipped upside-down.

The illustrations will appear as a targeted campaign in key locations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the form of outdoor ads and mobile billboards. Alongside the print campaign there is also a microsite which allows viewers to flip the images digitally and invites then to enter submissions and then track their votes in real time. In addition the campaign supports further user interaction via a social media campaign, encouraging users to take photos of the sides of the issue they support and then upload them to Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #VoiceYourView.

Hats off to BBH for creating another campaign that captures The Guardian’s commitment to open journalism and their striving ambition to cover the whole picture.

Here’s a classic TV ad from the Guardian aired in 1986 with a very similar message entitled ‘Points of View’.