every freedom needs a fighter
Amnesty International campaigns for human rights tirelessly around the world. Our challenge was to help make them more regionally relevant in Hong Kong with a focus on freedom of expression. Hong Kong’s freedom of expression is safeguarded by article 27 of basic law, but like everywhere these freedoms are on the decline.
There are various instances of this, including the case of the missing booksellers – where in 2016,
5 booksellers vanished, and their bookstores closed, for apparently selling controversial books.
To highlight this, and help people understand Amnesty’s cause, we decided to open a bookstore of our own. Except with one small difference. All the books on sale were redacted. Over 1000 books went on sale for 27 dollars to create an experience of what life without article 27 and freedom of expression might look like.
To support the experience we built a unique retail brand staying true to Amnesty’s core identity assets – yellow and black. We created a bespoke redacted typeface and graphic style, designing collateral sold in-store, from bookmarks and pins to posters, t-shirts and totes. We invited international artists, along with 50 HKU students to redact hundreds of donated books to be sold, and printed a limited edition run of our own redacted Amnesty book. We launched a broad social campaign, partnering with KOL’s to use our redacted content on social feeds. On the day of the opening we worked with Hong Kong Free Press to live redact their entire homepage. In just 2 days the bookstore sold out, creating hundreds of headlines locally and internationally. The bookstore captured the attention of community, becoming one of Hong Kong Reddit’s all time popular posts
CCO: Reed Collins
Creative Director: Andy Reynolds
Creative Director Mike Pearson
Senior designer: Gianluca Crudele
Senior designer: Kitty Chan
Art Director: Stratos Efstathiou
Art Director: Vivian Lam
Creative technologist: Craig Mason
Videographer / Photographer: Lucy McNally
Senior strategist, Social: Angus Chow
Senior strategist, Social: Chloe Yung
Vincent Wong: Illustrator
Agency: Oglivy / Brand Uniond