Jonas Salk Fan Club Sticker – Creativity vs. COVID: Ending the Pandemic for Good

Objective:

To popularize the story of Jonas Salk’s sharing his vaccine without a patent and show that another way is possible.

The Project:

Designed to be part of a set of fun materials for people who join The Jonas Salk Fan Club.

STRATEGIES:

TRY THIS:

Print it and stick it.

Join the fan club.

What worked?

The stickers are the perfect size, easy to distribute via the mail, and relatively inexpensive to produce.

Other Notes:

The “Patents Prolong Pandemics” phrase was

The work can be reproduced on site with instructions (provided)

Reflections from Steve Lambert

What was the process/journey of creating this work?

The “Profits Prolong Pandemics” phrase came from a tweet that fellow Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 participant, Anmol Gupta wrote and it has stuck with me. I try to incorporate it into other messages where it fits because it captures so much in 3 words.

The Jonas Salk Fan Club came from an AIDS 2018 campaign with Treatment Action Group and the Center for Artistic Activism and it deserves to have more of a life.

The sticker itself, well a vision popped into my head. The cut out head has this friendly and fun look from old music promotion posters of the late 50’s – which evokes the same era as the polio vaccine announcement. We wanted to make some additional materials to fit in the Jonas Salk Fan Club pack and I thought of a sticker. One of the places I order stickers from was having a sale and that’s always a good prompt to make something.

What would be your next steps, building on this idea, if you had a million dollars and all the time and skills in the world?

More fan club materials! Bumper stickers, membership cards (I may work on this one), posters, maybe starting chapters at universities as like a fun, social club with some shared values – so not quite UAEM, but a gateway to it.

If someone else were going to make/use/do something like this, what advice would you give them?

Just start messing around with design ideas. It usually takes me between 10 and 40 drafts to get to something I like. I try different things, colors, sizes, etc. I included some of those drafts as an image to give an idea of how it works, but it doesn’t reflect the whole process because I forget to keep drafts that are just not working at all.