The United Nations has now adopted The Global Goals for Sustainable Development, a proactive plan for the future. It is being accompanied by a global marketing campaign that aims to build grass-roots support for the UN initiative. Jakob Trollbäck, CCO of Trollbäck + Co, was asked to create the copywriting and visual branding — including a logo, icons and posters — for the campaign. His task: to take a complicated document written in dense political language, and turn it into something conversational, shareable, appealing, and above all, comprehensible to the world’s 7 billion people.
The text, 17 icons, and logo Trollbäck created for The Global Goals are being displayed in ads and related campaigns worldwide, projected on the side of the UN building in New York City, and were featured at the Global Citizen’s Festival in New York’s Central Park in late September, hosted by Stephen Colbert with headliners Beyonce and Pearl Jam.
Among the design concerns that Trollbäck needed to address: How do you create icons that can speak across cultures, languages, borders? How can one set of designs communicate with all people: Kenyan taxi drivers, Chinese factory workers, tech-obsessed American millennials, and the world’s leading media and cultural tastemakers? Trollbäck + Company was asked by Richard Curtis of Project Everyone to be involved in this project.
