This International Biodiversity Day, ANP| WWF and BAR Ogilvy are reinforcing the importance of ‘The Endangered Typeface’ campaign to “protect all animal life”.
When talking about the 6th mass extinction, can you really tell the difference a year makes? With the endangered typeface, a living font created in 2023 in a partnership with Associação Natureza Portugal (ANP), associated with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Lisbon Zoo, BAR Ogilvy believes you can. And if some letters are starting to look sharper, others have already faded significantly since BAR Ogilvy launched the campaign a year ago, on the International Day for Biological Diversity, which is being held on the 21st of May.
The endangered typeface is a living font where each letter represents a different species under threat. As the number of individuals in a species decreases or increases, the corresponding letter changes in the same proportion. Since first launched in May 2023, according to data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species, some letters are now starting to look sharper, but many more have faded significantly. Their first font update is happening soon to reflect these changes and, therefore, the sense of urgency of the campaign is still very much present.
“We created an impactful tool to help visualise the alarming number of species on a path to extinction. One year on, our endangered typeface has already evolved, reflecting the losses that occurred but also offering a sliver of hope, with some letters showing an uptick in the number of surviving specimens. This immediate and dramatic visualization is what we wanted to achieve with our campaign. We believe spreading the word and getting more people to jump to action is more important than ever,” said Miguel Ralha, CEO of BAR Ogilvy.
The endangered typeface is doing its job of spreading the word about an issue that grows more urgent every day. More than 44,000 species are threatened with extinction, a full 28 per cent of all assessed species on Earth. Before these letters fade, the campaign calls for people to download the font and keep using the endangered typeface to generate awareness.
In addition to donations from downloading the font, anyone can donate 50 euros or more to pick a letter representing a species and receive a numbered serigraph at home. All revenue raised will go towards ANP|WWF’s nature conservation projects.
