Mike Davis spent most of his professional design career creating album covers, concert posters, and logos for small businesses. Veda Partalo and her family came to the US as refugees fleeing Bosnia during the war. When the Syrian refugee crisis hit she posted on Facebook that she wanted friends to do something to offer support.
Veda had posted a call for contributions to donate to refugee families settling in the US, something she had done annually to commemorate each anniversary of her own family getting settled in the US. While most of the feedback was positive and encouraging, she did see one incredibly nasty and racist reply from someone she didn’t even know. The hatred inside this reply was powerful enough to inspire Veda to take action. She contacted Mike’s business partner Wes, who helped her develop the idea of a sticker that businesses could put in their front windows to let refugees and immigrant families know that they are indeed welcome and valued members of the community, despite what a small handful of hateful Facebook users had to complain about. With Mike’s help they created the sticker campaign “Refugees Welcome.”
When the opportunity to create a design for a social/humanitarian issue came about, Mike knew he wanted to get involved. It was not only different than his typical design projects, but the project “had a larger-than-life urgency that called to me,” he explained. “Additionally, my wife’s family came to the US in the late 1970s as refugees from Laos. I’ve heard her family tell stories about what they endured to flee their homeland and make their way to Minneapolis, so I knew this was a project I wanted to be a part of.”
From a design standpoint, they decided the graphic should be as simple and straightforward as possible. Mike looked to the universal wayfinding graphics found in airports for inspiration. Think of how little visual information is used to convey things like “escalator” or “men’s restroom.”
He had seen other “Refugees Welcome” stickers that showed cartoonish faces, a family running, or women wearing hijabs. Seeing as the sticker was meant to make people feel welcome, he didn’t want to include any specific details that might make someone feel left out. Gender, religion, and ethnicity were all kept wide open in the design so that a mother and four daughters from Somalia would feel just as welcome as a husband and wife from Syria.
SH Mike, did you think this would take off? Or meet with the hostility that was washing over the country?
MD I had a feeling that a small number of people would take to it and really appreciate what we were doing, especially given the overwhelming positive response Veda had received from her initial call for donations to refugee families. Of course we saw a few negative messages, but they were completely drowned out by the thank you letters and the hundreds of orders from all across the world.
SH You had an experience with a refugee who just came to the US; he saw the sticker in the window of a local library. Because of it, he went in and then brought all thirteen family members to get library cards.
MD Shortly after our first batch of stickers was sent out, we started receiving a lot of beautiful thank you letters from individuals as well as members of organizations, schools, churches, and corporations all across the globe who really felt the impact of the sticker. The best message was from a woman who worked at a library and reads as follows:
Just wanted to share an anecdote: Our library branch put up Refugees Welcome stickers after a teen services librarian requested them and shared with the branches. Last week, a man mentioned to our children’s librarian that he’d seen the sticker on our door and had come in to see if he could get a library card with the identification documents he had from his home country. His family, he said, had arrived only six days ago. All thirteen of them got library cards!
SH This is small scale, super simple, analog, and scrappy. Do you believe that this kind of grassroots thinking and graphic design wed together is potent, or was this a fluke?
MD To date, we have shipped out over fifteen thousand of these tiny little stickers to all points of the map. They’ve landed in all fifty states, Australia, France, Morocco, Switzerland, and beyond. We never sought out to change the world or make anything huge, just to create a three-inch sticker that could brighten someone’s day. If enough people believe in a small idea, they can help make it huge. And that seems to be what happened here.
SH How has this impacted what you both do in your professional lives?
MD This project has helped remind me to stay true to what I believe. All creative people, whether they are graphic designers, chefs, poets, musicians, or educators, have the power to affect the people for the better. If we all take a little bit of our time and energy to devote towards doing something for the greater good, we can all truly make a difference and make this world a better place.