An Anti-Torture Logo That Cleverly Communicates Across Three Cultures

Templo

Up until 2009, Sri Lanka, the island country just south of India, was engulfed in a civil war that lasted 26 years. In broad strokes, the war erupted in the 1980s over ethnic tensions between the Buddhist Sinhalese majority population and the Hindu Tamil minority, who the Sinhalese saw as the favorites of the British colonists. The last years of the war became particularly violent, and a reported 40,000 civilians died. Even though the war officially ended, the brutality hasn’t abated: a recent report found that Sri Lankan government forces continue to abduct, torture, and rape suspected members of the Tamil Tiger rebels, with no signs of stopping.

“Speaking as a Sri Lankan myself, there is this idea about it being a small tiny nation, and who the hell cares about our problem,” says Pali Palavathanan, creative director of design studio TEMPLO. “It’s genocide, what happened.”
Over the past year, it’s been Palavathanan’s job to get people to care. Specifically, to get western countries and the United Nations to care. He and his designers created a logo and graphic identity for #StopTorture, a human rights campaign seeking to raise international awareness about what’s going on in Sri Lanka. The finished logo is trilingual: the scripted icons spell out “stop” in English, Sinhalese, and Tamil. “We were asking early on, why can’t we connect the smaller tropical island to the rest of the world, to the English speaking majority? That problem drove us really quickly to an overall concept,” Palavathanan says.

Templo

Palavathanan is particularly sensitive to the topic because he happens to be Sri Lankan. His parents left Sri Lanka for the UK in the 1960s, so Palavathanan was raised far away from the atrocities that took place. But from visiting over the years, he accrued an instinctive kind of knowledge about how messaging and propaganda work in Sri Lanka. For instance, “the Tigers, they use this quite horrific flag, it’s got a tiger roaring and two rifles and it’s deep red, whereas the BBS [radical Sinhalese group], they used an orangey-yellow predominantly within the national flag itself.” That meant TEMPLO had to steer away from those or any similar colors.
Palavathanan also says that in Sri Lanka, the government uses typography as a political tool. Signage on the island has to include both the Sinhalese and the Tamil script, but it’s always the Sinhalese translation that gets top billing. Palavathanan wanted to reject the signage hierarchy, since it implies superiority, so he made sure the characters for the Sinhalese and Tamil “stop” signs lined up evenly.
Besides creating the logo, the team at TEMPLO had to create a legal report to submit to the United Nations last March, to persuade the Human Rights Council to take action and investigate the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government. Progress is in the works: in March, after receiving the reports, the council voted to investigate war crimes—committed by both the Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government—from those last few violent years.

source:wired