Mint designs bathing rules for migrants
Minz, Agentur für visuelle Gestaltung, in Lucerne was commissioned by the Swiss Lifesaving Society (SLRG) to create the graphic design for the information materials of the "Bathing Rules for Migrants" campaign.
This year, more than 30 people have already drowned in Switzerland; among them 17 migrants alone. Many underestimate the risks of rivers and lakes and/or cannot swim properly. This prompted the Swiss Lifesaving Society (SLRG), the Swiss Red Cross and the Association of Indoor and Outdoor Swimming Pools to launch an information campaign. The documents will be made available in August 2016 to counseling centers for migrants, asylum centers, etc., where they will be discussed with the migrants.
Representing cultural diversity
Minz, an agency for visual design, worked with illustrator Corina Vögele to create the graphic design for the documents in seven languages. "The work was also interesting for us because the documents had to be internationally comprehensible and the different cultural backgrounds of the migrants had to be taken into account," says Susann Blum, owner of Minz. For example, the images had to take into account the diversity aspect in terms of skin color, gender and clothing of the people depicted. This also included taking into account the image conventions of the different cultures as well as the different reading directions of the writing systems.
In every indoor and outdoor swimming pool, there are posters with the six most important swimming rules of the SLRG - represented in the distinctive blue-red pictograms. "In addition to these rules, we developed six further pictograms with a recommendatory character. Here, too, it was particularly interesting to design the pictograms in such a way that people from other cultural backgrounds in particular would understand them," says Susann Blum.
