Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?
The relationship between graphic design and health is not an immediately obvious one. But by the end of the Wellcome Collection's exhibit, I was convinced that good graphic design is one of the pillars that public health stands on.
The exhibition starts by throwing you back to the mid-20th century, taking you through the rise and fall of the tobacco industry. I found myself fully immersed in the artful fight between tobacco and governments; surrounded by cigarette packets, stamps and projections of infomercials. I admit that I was impressed by increasingly subtle designs adopted by tobacco companies as the rules of advertising tightened. But equally impressed by the quest for the ugliest, most unappealing packaging for cigarettes taken on by Australia's government.
Alongside the slow burning fight against tobacco, I found how design has optimised hospitals and medication; how it has helped to contain everything from the plague, to the Zika virus and how graphic design provokes and informs public perception of health.
I found myself appreciating the importantance of design more and more. Sharp colours and harsh imagery to catch attention and warn, softer shapes and hues for a more inviting campaign. A bright red forms the background of Stephen Doe’s murals in Liberia. Painted to depict the symptoms of Ebola, making urgent health information both bold and accesible simultaneously.
Or for example, Ollie Aplin's Mind Journal, a neatly designed invitation to express emotion in diary entries. Both interactive (the journal takes out the hard work by asking a new question every day) and cleanly designed the journal takes a calm approach to mental health.
And who knew that a font could depict something as complex as dementia? Alzheimer Nederland’s uses a typeface that quite beautifully displays people experiencing a fading world.
It is now clear to me that graphic design is the tool needed to elevate a public health message above ineloquent medical language into a visual language that really has the power to effect change.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? is at the Wellcome Collection until the 14th of January.