Wikipedia celebrates its 20th year on the internet, featuring work from Karabo Poppy Moletsane and Jasmina El Bouamraoui. Take a look at the Behind the scenes of this project.
We asked designers to help us create a set of 100 symbols celebrating 20 years of humans collaborating to collect the sum of all human knowledge on Wikipedia.
We commissioned two illustrators from different parts of the world who have never worked together before. One is Karabo Poppy Moletsane, an award-winning South African illustrator and street artist whose collaboration with Nike has been sported by LeBron James.
The other is Jasmina El Bouamraoui, a German-Moroccan former Goethe Institut resident. Both hold uniquely different, eye-catching styles and an unknowingly shared passion for decolonising design.
Together, the artists created a solution that reflects multiple cultures and corners of knowledge. Inspired by Mayan symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the symbols all individually hold their own meaning (with each symbol directly referencing an article on Wikipedia) and can be used as “Lego-style” building blocks to tell stories when combined.
