A Little ❤ Can Go a Long Way
The story of a scrappy symbol, created from the heart
On Tuesday, April 3rd, at 1:23 PM, I received a text from a coworker:
“shooter at youtube”
No follow up.
Someone had opened fire on employees at YouTube HQ in San Bruno. As you can imagine, I’d caught wind of the news relatively quickly being a Googler nearby in Mountain View. By 1:35, after a whirlwind of group chats, tweets and news alerts, I knew someone was on campus with a gun, there were multiple injuries, and I was 28 miles south of San Bruno with nothing to do but sit and wait by my laptop.
So I waited. I stared at my phone, and I waited.
This never really comes up after a shooting, but the waiting can be so incredibly painful for those close to the victims. I’d never compare it to what the folks at YouTube experienced (or any tragedy, for that matter). But the best way I can describe it is just a sinking knot in your stomach while you sit there, powerless, thinking to yourself:
“Who do I know at work today?”
“Who checked in safe?”
“Who hasn’t texted me back?”
“Do I know anyone in these news clips?”
“I’ve eaten lunch there.”
“Right there.”
All paired with a mix of silence, whispers, app alerts, and misinformation.
The incident hit me particularly hard, I think, because much of my previous team was working in that very building on YouTube Music. If I had simply made a different career decision less than a year ago, I could have been there with them — walking in a line outside with my hands raised. Hiding in a conference room.
Or who knows.
What I knew was that I needed to show that I was here, thinking about everyone. I wanted to reach out to the entire team one by one. But in the wake of something so traumatizing, words failed me. What’s there to say? “Sorry?”
So I made a thing.
It wasn’t anything remarkable — and certainly not intended to be groundbreaking design work. To be honest, I hadn’t even considered the resolution when I exported the first 600x400 artboard I made. The image, “youtube<3,” was posted to our internal message board with a link to an “I’m safe” Google Doc as a description. But since I hadn’t thought about how a “<3” would translate to a filename, it became youtube_3.
It was scrappy, a little haphazard, and existed entirely to show my friends, coworkers and everyone affected that I was here, and I cared if they were alright.
I closed my laptop and went to a meeting, just trying to keep things moving.
And that was it.
Later on, I received an email from a fellow Googler who puts together a daily company-wide email with news and updates about Alphabet:
Hey Brett,
Just a heads up that we are going to use your YouTube graphic in the Daily Insider today. It’s really beautiful.
Thanks,
“Of course,” I replied, and uploaded a vector to Google Drive.
The post went out, and the week progressed. Thursday morning, I woke to a sea of emails. The first was Sundar, reassuring the company that we stand by our YouTube family and we’d discuss safety at an upcoming town hall. Then there were the usual calendar invites, updates, bugs, etc.
Then this:
Hi Brett,
My name is ____ . I’m a Googler and I work at the YouTube office in San Bruno. I was also on campus on Tuesday.
As you might see — I changed my profile picture to the meme that you created. I hope it’s okay that I am using your creation. As I slowly ease back into work and am still processing what happened, I’m struggling to find a balance between going back to “business as usual” and acknowledging what has happened. Using your creation as my profile photo is a really meaningful way for me to acknowledge it, even in interactions when I am not explicitly talking about it. Thank you so much for giving me the ability to do that; it means a lot to me.
Followed by this:
Hi Brett. I sit in SBO and was there yesterday and your image made me cry. Thank you for creating it.
I made it my profile picture. Is that ok with you?
Then these:
Hi Brett — saw your name as the designer of the incredible YT logo updated with a heart. Are we allowed to use that logo externally?
As a nearly 10-yr part of YT, I’d love to stand in solidarity to the outside world using a small but meaningful gesture like the logo you designed.
Cheers to you — it’s lovely.
Thank you for the wishes, Brett. We are doing ok. The people make this place.
Thank you for creating the YouTube graphic with the heart. It’s beautiful, simple, and meaningful. I appreciate you putting it together. ❤
Hi Brett, thank you for making the logo. It means a lot to us. 2000 Youtubers got shirts with it today :) … Honestly it has become the icon of our healing. So thank you again.
Message after message, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude and love from my coworkers who’d all dealt with such trauma, but found some form of happiness in something so small. The simple act of changing their profile picture became a means to cope, to show support, and they wanted to share that with me.
I began to realize that it wasn’t so much design itself that can make an impact, but the context of the work we do. What began as a quick gesture of condolence somehow grew into an “icon of healing” and “a symbol of support“ that today adorns the back patio in San Bruno. In under a week, it’s been made into shirts, stickers, plaques, Facebook frames, Twitter profiles, Instagram posts and screens in YouTube offices across the world. All because the ones who shared it found meaning in its context: A little love when they needed it most.
And that, I suppose, is why I’m writing this today. It’s so effortless for us designers to get caught up in questions that stifle creativity — Is it consistent? Is it perfect? Is it unique? Does it pop? — that we forget that the simplest things are often the most accessible.
Something that brings people together doesn’t need to be brilliant to be successful, because it isn’t always your intention that’s important. It’s about the meaning people find in a symbol, and connecting with those who share their common understanding. Design as a means, not an end, if that makes any sense.
When you create something from the heart, if you don’t even have to think twice about it, then often the ones who see it won’t have to either. They’ll feel it. And so the easiest (and hardest) thing to explain about design might just be why a five-minute, low-res, misspelled image can take off into a world of its own:
Because it just feels right.
