When COVID-19 stroke, with it also came a torrent of disinformation : it affected only elder people, it could be cured by drinking enough water, it was transmissible by pets, etc.
Following the Peter Parker adage, “With great power comes great responsibility”, we thought that Google needed a way to deliver simple PSA-type messages in the region, in an easy to scale, consistently-branded fashion.
In a couple of days I created a library of flexible, simple visuals loosely based on Google visual language (without being being too close, since these were PSA-type messages rather than a branding exercise) and created design templates that would be easy to localize in any language.
This was still requiring a lot of manual work, since every country had their own messages to deliver, so we pushed it further by creating a simple (internal) web tool that would allow anyone at Google to create branded, high-resolution PNG images with their own customized messages, in a couple of clicks – and then to post them on their own social channels.
Later on, these visuals were also used as the basis for a low-key, lightly branded campaign in Japan “A love letter to Japan”.