I love the feeling a great, simple design evokes.

If you’ve picked up a magazine or watched prime-time television in the past few months, then you have seen the ads inviting you to visit WeCanSolveIt.org.

The We campaign is a recent project by Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection. To paraphrase their mission statement, the campaign’s goal is to halt global warming by educating people around the world that the climate crisis is both urgent and solvable.

I absolutely love the logo for this campaign. The design is simple, but incredibly clever. As your mind works to figure it out the hidden meaning, the logo carries your brain through a fun little journey of realization.

You start by reading the word “we” in a plain green circle. Nothing fancy, but something doesn’t feel quite right. What’s with that little serif hanging off the edge of the “w”? That’s not supposed to be there. Odd… you know you’ve seen that somewhere before. Oh yeah, that little serif is normally on a lowercase “m”, not a “w”. In an instant you realize it’s not the word “we”, it’s the word “me” upside down! But wait — not quite exactly. The “e” is still right side up. What’s going on here?

You read on a little bit and find out what the logo is for — it’s a campaign to bring people together to solve the climate crisis. Suddenly you get it. The mental story your brain just experienced makes sense and you feel like you just solved a puzzle. Solving the climate crisis isn’t about one, it’s about many. It’s not about “me”, it’s about “we”. Neat.

That’s a fun logo and an example of great, simple design.

In addition to being well branded, the We campaign itself is a great thing. I highly recommend checking it out and signing up. http://www.wecansolveit.org/

If you’re interested in learning more about the process that went into developing the branding for this campaign, check out this article from the NY Times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.