The co-founder of M&C Saatchi, Lord Maurice Saatchi, woke up one day in Sussex, England, with a detached retina. Lucky for him, he managed to get it diagnosed and operated on within 24 hours, and saved himself from being permanently blind.

 

On the other side of the world, Mr Stevens Chan, a former high-flying Malaysian businessman, ignored symptoms like headache and feeling of nausea for years before being diagnosed with glaucoma. He is now completely blind, even after 9 surgeries.

The protagonists in these two incidents had come together to initiate Simply See - a CSR initiative dedicated to spread awareness that blindness is preventable.

 

To jolt Malaysians into realising that losing one’s vision is a terrible ordeal, hence the need to take precautionary actions to preserve it.

 

One of the major symptoms of impending blindness is blurred vision. We decided to let the Malaysian public experience that first hand by creating a series of books that are blurred from cover to cover, inside out.

 

We placed these Blur Books at high traffic bookstores. The objective is to trick people into believing that they are experiencing some sort of problem with their eyesight, and let their imagination take over for a while – am I going blind?

 

When they finally reached a small insertion in the book, the big reveal is done – that this was all just a staged effort to get our message across.