Rebranding Chernobyl

“It's extremely effective,” said Armin Vit, editor of the graphic design criticism blog Brand New. “I think Banda was able to find something unique to Chernobyl. It’s iconic, it’s memorable, and it's easy to reproduce.”

It can be hard to imagine the sheer scale of massive human destruction, whether it be something like nuclear fallout, such as in Chernobyl, or war, such as the sort the Bulletin was founded to warn against. How do you represent a world affected by climate change, for example? Images of underwater streets, cracked earth, or the even more clichéd image of a polar bear stranded on an iceberg have become all too familiar. But how can the complex feelings associated with those disasters be evoked in a two-dimensional artistic medium like a logo?

“Nobody set out to create one of the most iconic symbols in the world when the peace symbol was made. It just came out of necessity at a time focused on disarmament. A symbol gets imbued with meaning and effectiveness with time,” Vit said.

Vit is especially familiar with this kind of design challenge. In 2010, he was part of the team that, with Michael Bierut from the US design firm Pentagram, helped update the iconic Doomsday Clock and establish it as the Bulletin’s logo. For nearly 75 years, those few lines and circles (first conceived by artist Martyl Langsdorf) have done the prodigious metaphorical work of gauging humanity’s threat to itself.

The Chernobyl logo is also chronological, except instead of counting towards doomsday, it counts the years since a nuclear disaster occurred.

“So here’s this octagon shape,” Vit said. “It doesn't matter if the world doesn’t know what it is on its own. But when the story gets told, that symbol takes on additional meaning.”

When the Banda designers were on the way out of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, they stopped at one of the many roadside gift shops that have cropped up in recent years. Some were shocked to find glow-in-the-dark condoms and “canned air” supposedly from the fallout site. “It was painful to see such disrespect,” Nesterevych said. Nesterevych and Shevchuk agree that the goal with the new Chernobyl logo was to keep the message positive, but also respectful of the lives lost and impacted by Chernobyl.

The Ukrainian government has an interest in reconciling sensitivity around Chernobyl’s survivors with international curiosity. Illegal tourist activity in the Exclusion Zone has happened before and since tourism was permitted, leading to potentially dangerous exposure to radiation, stolen artifacts, and severe injuries suffered when people entered structurally unsound buildings. Legal tourism allows for a controlled, less-exploitative way of appeasing curiosity. The government also realizes that many tourists, like the Banda team, often leave inspired.

“It’s not supposed to be entertainment. It’s an opportunity to understand the fragility of life, reflect on scientific responsibility, and a place to change your worldview,” Shevchuk said.

In the fall of 2020, the government opened nearly 30 miles of bicycle paths through the nature reserve that makes up more than two-thirds of the Exclusion Zone. Exclusion zone management is also working on kayak and helicopter tours that will explore the non-nuclear history and biodiversity of the area.

An official Chernobyl logo will give the government and licensed tourist agencies a unified look—especially online and in social media—and will enable the creation of official souvenirs that counteract the more vulgar ones.

“We had this archetype of a tourist from Barcelona who would visit Chernobyl, buy a backpack with a cool design, return home to Spain, and talk about the symbolism with people who ask what it means,” Nesterevych said. An added benefit of the changing logo is that tourists who return year after year will have new souvenirs to take home.

“It's definitely strange, because most logos are designed to last, so that you only have to print stationery once every five years,” Vit said. “But when you only have to make a few hundred t-shirts every year, it’s genius.”

In 2021, Banda won a prestigious Graphite Pencil Award for the Chernobyl brand from D&AD, a global competition for advertising and design. The design firm and the Ukrainian government split ownership of the intellectual property equally and work together on licensing the brand to private groups that employ locals who have a hard time finding jobs otherwise. Many of the people who were displaced by the war in Eastern Ukraine now live near Chernobyl.

“It’s good for the local economy, since people in the area—farmers, hospitality workers, etc.—make money,” Shevchuk said.

A small percentage of every ticket sold through licensed companies feeds into Ukraine’s national budget, though its proceeds are not always redirected to the Exclusion Zone since the number of tourists fluctuates from year to year. In 2019, 100,000 tourists visited the Zone, with 80 percent coming from outside of the country, including 6,500 from the United States. In 2020, the number fell to around 30,000 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shevchuk hopes people come back to Chernobyl to keep learning, exploring, and helping. He said the changing logo exemplifies the Zone’s ”movement from exclusion to rebirth and from darkness into light”—a sentiment that can inject a sense of hope into any disaster.