Two Fridays ago, after a summer that seemed to brim over with news stories about sexual assaults on college campuses, the White House launched the It’s On Us campaign: a celebrity-studded, heavily branded initiative aimed at changing how we culturally handle rape. The PSA spot features Jon Hamm, Questlove, Connie Britton, Kerry Washington, Obama and Biden, and others delivering one-liners about how “it’s on us”—a tagline cooked up by Mekanism, a San Francisco and New York-based creative agency.

After the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault compiled a report on sexual assault in April, the White House and Generation Progress (an arm of the nonprofit Center for American Progress) decided to launch a campaign promoting “bystander intervention.”

This is a new tack for these kinds of public service announcements: Rather than telling men ‘no means no,’ and instead of imploring women to report attacks when they happen, a bystander campaign calls on everyone to keep their eyes peeled and to create a culture that won’t tolerate sexual misconduct.

From there, Mekanism essentially had free rein to whittle down the message. They pitched five ideas, almost went with “Get in the way,” and then settled on “It’s on us.” “The way most sexual assault messaging in the past has been, there’s a perpetrator and the victim and those are the two parties involved,” says David Horowitz, Mekanism’s creative director. This campaign wants to involve everyone else: “If 6 percent of men on college campuses are assaulting women, then this 94 percent of men obviously are a much bigger group, and that is the group that can do something to stop it.”

A Mark That Serves as a Viral Badge

The ‘us’ forms the backbone of this message, so Mekanism built a dense logo out of that two-letter word, and stacked the ‘it’s on’ on top of ‘us,’ to suggest the collective responsibility we’re carrying. That mark will decorate t-shirts and ads aplenty, but Mekanism’s lead designer on the project sees it as more of a badge than just a logo. “[The White House] had a lot of partners, like the NCAA, and that early on gave me cues that this should be a team driven thing, where a badge or crest would be appropriate,” Albert Ignacio says. When people take the It’s On Us pledge, the website generates a new profile picture with that person’s photograph framed in the shape of the logo. The tactic is similar to when the Human Rights Campaign logo went viral over social media in 2013, but with some more customization.

One of the most problematic threads in the conversation around sexual assault has to do with the presumed lack of clarity around what constitutes non-consensual sex among (possibly, probably) intoxicated students. In the New York story about Emma Sulkowicz—the Columbia University student who’s currently carrying her mattress around campus until her assaulter is gone—the writer meets with the school's newly instated head liaison on sexual assault, who shows off new posters for the dorms. They use traffic light color codes to give students a "vocabulary" for discussing consensual sex. "Red means stop: You’re drunk, asleep, or passed out, or one person doesn’t want to have sex. Yellow is pause: mixed signals. Green: A mutual decision has been made about how far to go and 'all partners are excited and enthusiastic!'”

Whether or not these posters are patronizing to students (who are legally considered adults) may be beside the point. What's clear is that the dialogue around this topic is often opaque and convoluted. So throughout the It's On Us site, the layout has all the simplicity of a children’s book: Once you reach ‘the tools’ section, tips for preventing sexual assault flash by, one by one, from “Talk to your friends openly and honestly about sexual assault” to Tip No. 13, which provides resources for victims. The parallax site starts with a black-and-white landing page. Scroll down, and in a Wizard of Oz-like reveal, sprigs of color start to show up. Scroll further to the list of pledged names, and the page practically becomes day-glo. The idea, Ignacio says, is the site will “to come to life as you start to educate yourself about the cause.”

But What Effect Can It Really Have?

There are many arguments for how we should deal with sexual assault on campus. There has, predictably, already been criticism of It’s On Us. One of main challenges the Mekanism team had to face early on is the systemic nature of sexual assault. In ten years, there won’t be a Surgeon General or Bureau of Labor Statistics report with improved numbers; it's a cultural shift. “This isn’t a typical campaign where you can urge people to get screened for an illness, or stop smoking. The impact is going to be over a long period of time,” Horowitz says. To that end, “the site has a lot of interaction, and tools that colleges and organizations can use.”

Campaigns of this scale inevitably raise an uncomfortable question: Can throwing celebrities, money, and slick graphic design at the problem affect real change? Right now, that’s impossible to answer. Mekanism has created what Horowitz sees as a better PSA: “The visuals associated with sexual assault on college campuses show a predatory male, they present you with a lot of information all at once, and they feel overwhelming and they feel not inviting. We had to find a way for this campaign not to be about scare tactics or about pointing fingers. We didn’t want it to blend in with every other public service announcement.”