Refugee Nation

WHAT, HOW & WHY.

Refugee Nation is a response in the shape of a campaign to the Global Refugee Crisis.

It is composed of a corporate identity, posters, flags, ads, and BTL strategies.

This was my Thesis project for college. The briefing was essentially "not enough people in Catalunya care about Refugees or know what's going on with them". The winning project would be implemented during World Refugee Day (June 21st) in select Barcelona sites and be featured in City Council's website.

ACADEMIC POEM

This project was unique for a couple of reasons. The first one is all the buzz about it being the last thing you do in IED Barcelona and how deadly the final presentations are. And also because of the Academic Writing portion, something that wasn't even remotely mentioned in my four years of study.

It wasn't really that different from any long projects I had done in the past, perhaps even more simple in the sense that with others the final product was dependant on many technical things working, not just a tagline.

Actually, the 15000 words required for the final delivery were perhaps the most straightforward part in execution, although not the easiest. Once all the research had been considered, all the sources cross-checked and the conclusions revised, it was a matter of explaining as succinctly as possible all the connotations of the campaign.

THE LARGEST, FAKEST COUNTRY

I took a series of figures from a paper made by Save The Children that put in perspective how the Nation of the World's Refugees would fare in several rankings. Population, youth, economy, GDP, marriage… although hard to verify, the assumptions seemed cautious enough as for me to take them at face value.

I thought about how a there could be a country of considerable potential pretty much going to waste because their members are mostly forcibly displaced people. That gave me the idea of creating an identity for the ones without one, a Refugee Flag, a Refugee Anthem, and a Refugee Passport, all for the Refugee Nation.

The tagline is pretty clean. This is a country that, first of all, shouldn't exist, and second of all, shouldn't have such massive numbers.

65 million citizens, 30 million of them underage, 300 languages, 150 nationalities, 120 religions… all coexist in the country that shouldn't exist.

I wanted to give a flag to the people that are in political limbo, unable to go to their home country because there is war and unable to go somewhere else because they are unwanted.

It is an unlucky, impossible situation for all involved. Nobody wants to be a political escapee, and no country wants to harbour one. Let alone millions.

FAD OR FACT

The only concern I had with this project was how the client was going to receive the news that one of the proposals was a literal black flag for the Refugees. They were pretty psyched about the idea, and also about the identity system that allowed to make campaigns wildly different amongst each other but still have a concrete layout that would unify them.

I presented a strong campaign with the capability to prolong it's existence over time, although that existence depended on a couple hundred thousand people continuing to be horrible with each other.

TUTORS: RORY LAMBERT, JOAO ALVES, ALEX BELTRÁN, PABLO RAUSELL, JULIE FOALE.