You Are Not Alone Murals is a project run by Purpose Projects NY, a registered non profit. It aims to inspire artists to create public murals in their communities with the message You Are Not Alone, written in any language, always using the same color palette of black, white, grey and yellow.

 First problem is, who named this thing? It has a million words in it. Ok, full disclosure, I’m the co-founder of this project, so I’m to blame for this name. The first thing I wanted to make sure was we had a number of different layouts from horizontal to vertical, there was clearly not going to be a one size fits all solution. I always wanted to make sure we had a logo icon which could be used in place of the incredibly long name. 

For the lettering style I wanted something with a bit of texture and a bouncy playful baseline to make it conversational. Finding ways to interlock the letters together was key to avoid and awkward holes or blank spaces in the lock ups while trying to maintain as much fidelity as possible from one layout to the next. I landed with a single line, for use on the website, and a 4 line, for use on the back of a tshirt right away as those were going to be our first two applications. 

For the social media profile pic we went with icon only, allowing it to be larger. We also knew we wanted to attract artists in different communities and countries that speak and would paint in different languages so having a symbol that told who we are (artists) and what we share (connection and vulnerability) it made it meaningful to lead with that. 

Having yourself as a client makes it a pretty quick job without a lot of back and forth. So, no changes, no round two. It was just time to start applying this!