"Cohesion, respect, acceptance, inclusion! On this afternoon, the terms just fly through the office on Warschauer Straße.
Four athletes from the World Games are sitting at a long table together with the creatives from the advertising agency spring brand ideas from Berlin and discussing a new project. The goal is to create a T-shirt with a cool message for the World Games - a so-called statement T-shirt. This will make the wearers visibly part of the Special Olympics movement!
There are colorful pieces of the logo cut out on the table and several white papers with ideas for messages for the T-shirts. The idea is to find a slogan that the athletes can identify with. A message that is important to them and also gets across.
The communication agency and the team of spring stand for socially relevant topics with the SDG's of the United Nations as a compass and have been committed to the topic of inclusion for a long time.
Spring is a team of 25 minds that have been showing attitude with their work for 7 years. For example, for GermanZero, Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, the city of Berlin or who bring For Our Planet, an optimistic magazine for sustainable action, to the newsstands for Burda Verlag.
Spring has already done campaigns for Kölle Zoo, the Urban Nation Museum and the city of Berlin. And now the creatives are working with our athletes - everyone is very excited on both sides.
"What terms are particularly important to you?" asks Marion Heine, creative director and founder of spring zuerst. "Cohesion, respect and acceptance" - is the athletes' direct answer to that. Or to put it another way - the most important thing is "that you also accept what the other person is like," says athlete Juliana. A statement that everyone can only agree with. But how do you put this message on a T-shirt, we asked ourselves?
Another challenge was to formulate the meaning of the message in a way that everyone could understand. After all, this year's World Games will be attended by athletes and guests from all over the world! So we soon came up with terms that can be understood in English and German: "Respekt" in German sounds almost the same as "respect" in English, and the same goes for "Team" and "team", or "Inklusion" and "inclusion".
In search of further inspiration, the team from spring and the athletes tried out a wide variety of sayings.
Our participants especially liked"It's Berlin when everyone is special"!
Special, a word that lives from uniqueness, specialness and appreciation - just like in the Special Olympics name itself, everyone agreed. And the saying also seemed a bit funny, after all, as native Berliners, the athletes know their capital city with its extravagant characters very well!
"Then they'll all think, wüüüh, which T-shirt is that?" laughs athlete Juliana.
"Berliners often think they're the coolest anyway," creative director Andrea joins in the laughter.
But there was another saying that the athletes really liked: VIP - Very Inclusive Person! "But maybe not everyone understands it because it's in English" says Monique. "But the other slogan is in German and there are a lot of athletes from all over the world, so there's something for everyone!" Athlete spokesperson Juliana convinces everyone. So it was decided - we had our messages, now only the design was missing!
"White is everywhere, we need something different!" and "It needs to be colorful!" - the athletes quickly agreed on which direction it should go! Colorful, eye-catching, new, unique!
Florentine, Spring's social media creator, told us a particularly good idea: she sat down with two of the athletes* who hadn't really started yet. "Do you want a tip?" she asked, and they both nodded. "In the beginning it always looks so empty and you wonder how it might look good. If you put everything on it first and then take things away, you're not afraid to put anything on it at all."
Thus, piece by piece, more and more designs were created, and in the end, incredibly creative and special, colorful T-shirts lay spread across the table. A complete success! You can read more about the project and watch videos here.
With much laughter and anticipation, we finally said goodbye to the team from spring!
Two t-shirts that boldly stand for inclusion and uniqueness, with original designs from our athletes* in bright, cheerful colors! Definitely new pieces of heart!
Here you can have a look at the t-shirts and order them directly if you like them:
- Designer T-shirt "It's Berlin when everyone is Special".
- Designer T-shirt VIP - Very Inclusive Person
