SUBMITTED PHOTO – Natalie Long poses with her daughter Olivia at their home in Medicine Hat Tuesday, showing the COVID-19 time capsule Natalie created through her graphic design business Long Creations. The capsule project went viral this month, garnering attention worldwide.
Knowing the global pandemic is something that will shape her daughter’s life, Natalie Long used the best way she knows how to help document it.
Little did she know the resulting time capsule project would get noticed around the world.
“Everybody’s going through the same thing, right, so it’s brought everybody together in a way, I feel like it’s a positive thing,” said Long, the graphic designer behind Long Creations. “You never think anything you do is going to go viral.
“I did it for (my daughter) Olivia.”
The free, printable set of worksheets has been downloaded so many times, Long herself doesn’t have a firm number. Demand for it crashed two of her file-sharing services, then the website of a friend who offered to host it.
To get a sense of how big the project has become, Long notes the Long Creations Facebook page has grown from 13,000 likes two weeks ago to more than 32,000 as of Wednesday.
“I think I gained 15,000 in the first two days,” said Long. “Loads of people have saved it and re-shared it, so honestly I can’t track it. It would be amazing to know how many times and how many houses it’s in, but I have no idea.”
In a post Tuesday asking new followers to say where they’re from, responses came in from every corner of the globe. South Korea, Australia, Ireland, South Africa – the project is spreading positivity even though the virus has killed 123,010 people and infected 1.9 million globally according to Wednesday’s numbers from the World Health Organization.
“It helped my daughter to work through some of her feelings around this and also stay busy (while) mom and dad are both working long hours,” wrote one commenter in Seattle, where the first wave of the pandemic in North America hit hard.
With simple images designed to be coloured in, My 2020 COVID-19 Time Capsule has pages for scrapbooking, information, how you’re feeling and what you’ve observed. Long has since added special downloads geared toward adults, newborns and those whose first language is French and Spanish. There are even alternative versions for Americans and those who prefer purely metric system measurements.
With 26,000 shares of one of the Facebook posts alone and media coverage as far away as England, the project has blown away any expectations.
After all, it was really just for Olivia, and to a lesser extent her son John (who’s not quite old enough to fill it out).
“I was collecting newspaper articles, writing down what we do every day, keeping all the artwork they do and putting it in a box,” said Natalie, who’s been isolated like most people for the past month due to national and provincial directives. “It’s like a time capsule, something fun for them to look back on in the future
“It was literally just as organic as that.”
