Template blank of “stay alert, control the virus, save lives”

(Download link for Zip of PNG, SVG and .afdesign files)

The transition of the UK / English government’s coronavirus messaging from the pretty clear “Stay Home” line (red and yellow branding) to the uselessly vague and aspirational “Stay Alert” with its green-and-yellow colour scheme is a terrible idea. It’s already being widely mocked with hot fresh memes, as is the fashion of these times.

I’ve looked, but failed to find, a meme-template blank of the original image. I even struggled to find high-res source material. It was all JPEGd to hell, everywhere I looked.

So, I did a bit of very basic image-bashing – flood-filling the (squishy JPEG-artefact-laden) regions of should-be-solid colour with actual solid colour, then got Inkscape to do a vector trace. Finally a very quick tidy-up of the worst of the wobbly lines in Affinity Designer.

This is not a pixel-perfect replica, but it’s as much as I could be bothered to make for my own use. I’m just throwing it out there in case it’s of help to anyone else.

That image may not be as “pure” of a PNG as might be desired, due to the use of image re-compression stuff on this website. A Zip archive is also available, containing the un-fiddled PNG blank, plus the vector in both SVG and Affinity Designer (.afdesign) formats.

Download the zip bundle of this template blank (containing PNG, SVG and Affinity Designer formats).

License: As I can’t find an official gov.uk direct source for the original graphic, I can’t figure out what license (if any) applies to that. So I’m not claiming any particular copyright-originality on my “turn it in to a clean blank meme template”. Call it Public Domain (as far as my input and work is concerned), but I would appreciate a credit or link back if you felt like it.

I cannot assert that this is a “perfect dedication to the Public Domain” because of the above-stated uncertainty about the original graphic upon which my work was based. I can state only that if my work in making the nice clean meme-blank is capable of copyright protection, I waive it. However, I cannot speak to any rights in the original composition.