Alissa Eckert
AR How did you come to be involved with the project?
AE The day after the CDC opened its Emergency Operations Center for Covid-19 on 20 January 2020, Dan and I were asked to create an identity for the virus. Maybe you can think of it as a mugshot, something that represents what this enemy is.
AR What was your brief?
AE Because of our experience in the past, they left a lot of it up to us, but they requested something up close, with a bit of drama, something bold that was going to catch the public’s attention. It’s a public health emergency alert essentially. We were trying to make something that was going to draw people in and bring them back to the CDC website to learn more about the evolving situation. Not many people knew about Covid-19 at the time.
AR Can you deconstruct the end result for us and describe how the design process and its outcome fulfil those objectives?
AE We wanted it to be really bold and attractive. First of all, we wouldn’t have wanted it to be too playful. People just wouldn’t take it seriously if we did that, right? We needed something that felt serious. So, we played upon the realism a little bit, using it to help people understand that this thing actually
