Dear humanity, after Coronavirus you seriously need a brand
Something to remind us of what we went through and where we want to go.
28 April 2020 — We have a website and a manifesto you can co-sign: https://brandinghumanity.org
Right now we’re each facing isolation, from the world outside and from the people around us.
The people we’re used to seeing each day. The ones we see on our daily commutes. The ones we share an office or a much needed cup of coffee with.
But now we’re experiencing a lot more alone time.
Both with ourselves and with our thoughts.
And today, while sharing a coffee with myself, I had an epiphany.
A clear idea of the moment we are each experiencing, both individually and collectively.
Right now we’re facing an opportunity to redesign a world different from the one we lived in before the Coronavirus took hold of it.
That world — as we should remember, in case someone forgot — was not going well.
It was a world that risked becoming uninhabitable way ahead of its time, due to a gigantic climate crisis.
A closed world oriented to protect us from diversity and change.
A world that rejected the foreigner, that protected political friendships and patronage over merit, that built walls and introduced tariffs, that encouraged us to defend ourselves with weapons in hand, that spread hatred via the Internet, that did not tolerate love other than heterosexual love.
A world built entirely on the need to respond to an ignoble and rampant feeling: fear.
Then suddenly the virus came.
It monopolized our agendas and upset our lives, but it also opened up the possibility of making courageous choices, which we had been postponing for far too long.
So we started moving.
Today’sInternet resembles what we designed years ago: not a hate accelerator, but a place born to share, collaborate, unite. With the Internet today, we are socially united. Our solidarity travels online and reminds us that we are all part of the same humanity, physically distant yet so close.
“We are all in this together” is a splendid message for us and for our politicians: we are experiencing this emergency together and we will have to get out of it together, with collective decisions that take into account everyone’s needs and not with the familiar unilateral and divisive choices we once were forced to take.
Fantastic things are happening.
Scientists from around the world, pharmaceutical companies and governments are working together to find a vaccine. Medical research data is being made public in an accessible and machine-readable format. Some companies are converting their plants to produce life saving masks, gowns, and ventilators. Others are competing to support hospitals and activate extraordinary welfare measures for their employees. Hotel rooms and student dorms are being converted into quarantine shelters. And we as human beings are holding each other close, with concrete gestures of solidarity and togetherness.
Everything is extraordinary, yet there are some questions that continue to flash through my mind.
When we have found a vaccine and the emergency has passed, will we remember all this?
The songs that once played from the balconies, the gestures of solidarity, friendship, and sharing?
Will the world we build back up again be open and inclusive?
Will the new economy be an instrument at the service of our happiness, or will it still be a means for the profit of a few?
Will public health, environmental protection, and human rights be the priorities of the new global agenda?
Will we learn to collaborate or will we build new walls?
I can’t answer these questions, but I can certainly say which world I want to live in.
In my world, we are all neighbors, both near and far.
It is a world that exists without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias. A connected, interdependent and supportive world. A world in which we are all equal: judged by what we think and how we act, not by the way we look.
In this world we are all together. And together we will find a way to be happy and to thrive, no matter where we come from, whether we are young or old, rich or poor.
This new world must arise from this emergency.
Why? Because we have learned to deal with something bigger than us and because we understand that it is only surpassed if we are together. And to avoid forgetting this lesson we need a message, for our future and for future generations. A symbol that reminds us that the communities we are building today deserve a place in our tomorrow.
This symbol is in all respects a brand.
It is the brand of the new humanity that, passing through this pandemic, rediscovers the urgency to be united, open, curious and supportive.
How do you design such a brand?
It is an ambitious project, which should belong to the community and not to be owned by an individual or an organization.
It is a project that must be approached with great humility and with clear and transparent rules. Before starting the design, I listed them on a sheet of paper:
Simplicity
It is the basic rule of any good design project. In this case, however, it matters even more. Our brand must be understandable for everyone, from the child to the elderly, from the illiterate to the scholar.
Universality
The brand must be inclusive and must be able to belong to everyone, without limits of geography, culture or language.
Customization
Everyone must be able to appropriate the brand. We need a dynamic identity that can adapt to different contexts.
Reproducibility
It must be very easy to reproduce the graphic sign of the brand and not only with the help of technology: a child must be able to draw it with pen and paper or even with the food on their plate.
Openness
It must be in the public domain and anyone who wants to collaborate must be able to add their contribution.
Designing today
With these rules, me and my team (Amelia, Elena, Marco and Riccardo) have designed a symbol that is actually a set of other symbols, taken from our different backgrounds, traditions and cultures.
The main element of the symbol is the eight-pointed asterisk, a graphic sign that has the function of connecting opposite ends. In our logo, each end of the asterisk has a precise meaning: North-South, East-West, Young-Old, Rich-Poor. The asterisk is the sign that has the sole purpose of representing the whole of humanity, understood as a collective in which opposing elements coexist.
The asterisk is enclosed in two square brackets, which represent the union of humanity.
The symbol can stand alongside the buzzwords of the era in which we are living. Words such as United and Together, and embodying them at the core of its design.
When recreating the symbol, as we connect the points of the asterisk, the meaning behind the extremes they represent should be mentally recited, followed by the word United:
From North to South, from West to East, the Young and the Old, the Rich and the Poor: United.
All humanity, united.
The simplicity of the design facilitates the ease of reproduction, so much so that it can also be typed on a keyboard: [*]
Making it a living brand, that is able to be applied to various contexts, personalized, manipulated, used as a mask, or combined with photographs and illustrations.
A brand that can live, adapt and grow alongside us.
Redesigning tomorrow
This for us is only the beginning of the journey.
We know there is still a long way to go. We want to write a manifesto and we would also like to make a short film to tell its story.
But above all, we would like to see many applications of this brand, in contexts that tell and enhance the new humanity that we will build and the collective and social heritage that we will leave to our children. To help us to never forget what we went through, but above all to remember with what courage and strength we gained from it.
All our source files are available on Github or in this folder to be downloaded and manipulated.
If you want to collaborate on this project you can do it freely. We encourage you to share with us your work, your ideas, and your applications. You can do so by filling out this form. We will be happy to collect everything we design together to put into an online archive.
The most important thing of all, however, is that you ask yourself, just as we have: do you want to bring the world back to the situation it was in before the Coronavirus pandemic, or do you want to redesign it from scratch, for how it could be and how you would like it to be?
Let’s build something great, together.
This work is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license.
