Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the messages flooding our feeds have taken on a life-or-death quality that increases anxiety and makes them simultaneously impossible to ignore and important to triage.

How do you filter noise from signal when you may come across an ad for feeding hungry children and an ad for a more comfortable and stylish mask using the same terms and similar design language?

The GPG Design team wrestled with many of these same questions for our work in the COVID-19 messaging space. Ultimately, we chose to focus on three central concepts to guide our work:

• Everything we design should feel verifiably true and additive to the conversation, not merely signal for signal’s sake.

• With so much to sift through, we chose to make our messages as clear and direct as possible, cutting out unnecessary clutter.

• We choose to avoid shock or schmaltz, focusing instead on images and design language that spoke to personal worth and hope. 

With the crisis far from over, we intend to continue evolving our creative output while adhering to these core principles.