Double Ribbon

Symbol of awareness for the transmission of the AIDS virus from mother to child) / The Born HIV Free campaign logo (19 May 2010)

A mother protecting her child: that is what the Double Ribbon, created for the Born HIV Free campaign to promote the Global Fund to fight AIDS, stands for. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Global Fund’s ambassador for the protection of mothers and children, kicked off this awareness campaign as a step towards entirely eradicating mother-to-child HIV transmission, which is one of the Millennium Goals, by 2015. This campaign needed a logo and H5, a graphic artist collective, designed it around the Red Ribbon, the international symbol of solidarity and compassion for AIDS victims. It was already thinking about using the red ribbon and nestling it in a larger medium-grey ribbon at the start. It drew it with a felt pen, and there is something deliberately awkward about it: it captures a mother’s worries about her child. It gets the message across. Every IT company that came on board the campaign run by Julien Civange (YouTube, Google, Orange, etc.) featured the ribbon on its website, and it was the leitmotif for a series of educational films by H5 to kick off the Born HIV Free campaign on 19 May 2010. It was also on a pin that Tiffany, a jeweller, created to support this drive, on a T-Shirt available online, on a striped sailor’s T-Shirt by Jean Paul Gaultier, and on a vast Europe-wide billboard campaign in Autumn 2010. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy presented this Double Ribbon as the symbol of her long-term commitment alongside the Global Fund on 16 July last. The Born HIV Free / Tiffany pin depicting it was also given to the African first ladies who attended the Bastille Day ceremonies in France on 14 July last. The wives of the Heads of State of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Benin, Niger, Mauritania, Congo, Gabon, Senegal, Mali and the Central African Republic are very involved in efforts to tackle the healthcare issues in their countries.