The Pentagram-based environmental public service Do Green Thing team has launched Ungifted, the first global alternative to the billions of unwanted presents that we send each other every Christmas.
Ungifted separates Christmas from presents, inviting users to offer their colleagues, friends and family some precious time instead. The free service aims to curb rampant Christmas consumption, which will see the average millennial Londoner spend £767 on presents, the population of Britain receive £2.4 billion worth of unwanted gifts and Americans part with enough dollars to surpass the GDP of 181 other countries.
Do The Green Thing has designed the Ungifted website where users can personalise and send Ungift cards. The cards are anti-consumption Mad Libs, which users can fill in sincerely, playfully or any which way they please. The website also features anti-tat slogans, which in a piece of typographic sustainability, repurpose Pentagram’s duct tape typeface for ‘New Practices New York 2014’.
Ungifted is accompanied by ‘Why Santa must die’, a polemic by Do The Green Thing co-founder and Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani, that exposes the level of unchecked festive consumption and eviscerates the ultimate symbol of capitalist Christmas - Santa, and ‘Santa Exposed’, an illustration by monster creator and Super Furry Animal collaborator Pete Fowler that depicts Santa as the menace he really is.
