Recently, the United States has declared a state of Public Health Emergency to deal with the H1N1 pandemic. Governments around the world are trying to inform their population about the new virus. I decided to interrupt my investigation about bad taste in Montreal to bring you a sampling of logos and visual element of public health campaigns used by governments from around the world.
Let's start in Canada
Canadians can count on 14 ministries of Health. One federal and one for each province or territory. The federal government set up a website at fightflu.ca with a rather sterile logo. Aside from the usual information about the pandemic, the website links the visitor to health authorities of his/her own province/territory.
Things get interesting when we visit each provinces site. The one for Manitoba is clearly the most cheerful. It's very colourful. It looks like the website of a cartoon, which I guess helps in telling kids to wash their hands. It's enough to get anyone excited about the flu !
The government of Nunavut decided to portray the h1n1 virus as a scary monster. It's very convincing.
"Stop the spread of the FLU !" says Nunavut while Nova Scotia tells us how to do that by saying:
"dirty hands spread infections. Wash up !"
Finally, in Quebec, we have our own H1N1 pandemic logo, it's interesting because as you can see it's circular, half of it is an earth globe, the other is a stylized virus. Arrows point to the contagious nature of the virus.
Beyond our borders, France also has a logo for it's anti-flu campaign that says: "Stop! aux virus de la grippe" (Stop the flu viruses) One can see a virus crashing onto a wall, by showing in lighter tones the virus before it crashes, the designers show us the previous positions of the virus, resorting to the process used in 2d animation to make a round object bounce. Our eye, thus expect the virus to bounce after being heavily damaged by an invisible wall.
The Spanish government's logo is very compelling. The one on their pandemic documentation is much less interesting. see:
For now the palm goes to Germany.
First they have a great ministry of health website. Aside from the great design, we can see the confident faces of Germany's new health minister and his colleagues. The website links us to another one specifically made for the pandemic. So far the coolest. It even has tips I haven't seen anywhere else, for example the site says that if you're sick open the windows to get fresh air, and don't go to work because not only will you contaminate coworkers but the productivity of your workplace will suffer.
