What does ‘Save the Children’ do?

The British design group Johnson Banks have been working on an interesting project for Save the Children.

The basic problem faced by the client was that, despite the name, no one really knows what they do. Added to that, their corporate identity is a little, er, dull, and their corporate guidelines are quite strict about the use of Gill Sans as their typeface. (Guidelines do that – that’s the whole point – but the problem here is that they maybe take ‘corporate’ too far, and make the charity appear less than friendly).

The idea they came up with was to give outlines of the font, in several weights, to children to get them to fill them in. Then the best were chosen, digitised, and are now being used in Save the Children publicity – the guidelines are adhered to, but with a little creativity they also manage to make Save the Children a little bit more childlike without being childish.

Here are some images from the project. You can see the whole story at Johnson Banks’s blog (which is worth subscribing to). Of note is the fact that they had to get permission from Monotype, who ‘own’ Gill Sans, to treat the typeface in this way.