Norman Fowler, health secretary, 1981-87

I first heard about Aids as a serious issue in 1985. I didn’t know much about gay culture at the time; I didn’t have any gay friends. But the attacks on gay people motivated me. Some people thought anyone with HIV should be left to their own fate, and there were certainly people in government who felt uneasy about homosexuality. I thought – this is unjust.



We had no knowledge of this disease and no drugs with which to treat it. I was reading a note the other day from the chief medical officer at the time and some of the predictions as to what could happen were terrifying – we were talking millions and millions of people becoming infected. That’s why we launched what is still the biggest public health campaign there’s ever been in this country with leaflets sent out to every home.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a natural supporter’ … Fowler in 1986. Photograph: PA

Not everyone was on board with the idea. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a natural supporter. She had the view that if you told young people about HIV and unprotected sex, you’d be telling them about things they didn’t know about, and the implication was that they’d want to go out there and do it. I always thought that was an eccentric view. We were warning people, not urging them.



The TV adverts we ran were certainly hard-hitting. There was no point spending a load of money to send out innocuous adverts. We did follow-up research that said 90% of the public recognised the advert and a vast number changed their behaviour because of it. Columnists at the time said we were going over the top but the public didn’t agree. It was a life and death situation. I’d been to San Francisco, where the wards were full of young men dying. Same in Germany, same in the United Kingdom. There was no time to think about whether it might offend one or two people. And history shows we were right – people took care and HIV cases went down.



I’ve heard it said that the advert was so scary it put a whole generation off having sex. Well I don’t think there’s any evidence that it actually did! What I do know is that I get letters from time to time from people who say thank you – that it saved their life. In politics, you don’t get that sort of letter very often.



Malcolm Gaskin, designer

My agency, TBWA, had been working on health campaigns for the government for five or so years – nurse recruitment, blood donations, rubella epidemics. So when Aids hit the news they turned to us. The big problem was that nobody knew anything about it. It was like an alien plague. Where did it come from? How big would it get? Panic and speculation was spreading.

Norman Fowler and his team gathered a hefty bunch of people around – people from the prison services, the army, immigration and social services – to discuss how to tackle it. It was agreed we would attack the disease itself rather than the people who had it, which is how other agencies might have gone about it.



One of the tombstones from the film. Photograph: BFI on YouTube

Nobody even knew what to call it. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome wasn’t very catchy, but when they came up with the acronym Aids it was something we could work with. For the posters we went for modern typography – we wanted people to know this was a new thing, not just another bunch of medical letters –with an underscore on the word Aids. Almost like a logo. The phrase “don’t die of ignorance” was coined by [fellow designer] David O’Connor-Thompson. The death part was important – and knowledge was really the only thing we had at the time to defend ourselves against it.

With the TV advert we knew we had about 40 seconds to get people’s attention. That’s not enough time to explain anything complex – we just needed viewers to make sure they read the leaflets that would be arriving through their door. Scaring people was deliberate. The director Nic Roeg was specifically chosen for his doom and gloom sci-fi aesthetic. It starts with a volcano because it’s about the end of the world. Originally it was even scarier: we had metallic sirens blaring like the beginning of a nuclear war. But Thatcher thought we were overdramatising it and she was probably right. If we’d kept it like that I think everyone would have headed for the beaches.



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People remember the tombstone but there were a lot of smaller, softer campaigns that went with it – tailored messages for people who might be affected such as dentists or tattooists. We had to inform people and reassure them – we didn’t want hairdressers shutting down because suddenly people were scared of catching something from scissors. We also had post marked by Royal Mail with the campaign slogan. I know some people didn’t like that – receiving a letter from their auntie with “don’t die of ignorance” stamped on it.



I knew at the time that what we were working on would be history so I kept a lot of stuff – including an actual black granite Aids tombstone. Not the original – that was three tonnes – but I’ve got one in lock-up that’s about a hundredweight. I had to get it out the other day because it’s being exhibited, so it was in the garden when my builder arrived. He jumped back and shuddered when he saw it – so it can definitely still scare people.

• Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? is at the Wellcome Collection, London, from 7 September.