World’s smallest billboard

Held annually over 3 days, Design Indaba is the world’s leading conference for designers and creative thinkers.

Absa is South Africa’s biggest supporter of design. Absa believes that design and creativity are the backbone of a country’s economy.

We needed to tell people this at Design Indaba 2025. So, we created a virtual country – The Democratic Republic of Design – where delegates could contribute to the economy, simply by sharing creative ideas and inspiration. The virtual country lived as an app to your mobile phone. In order to attract citizens to our virtual republic we needed some pretty innovative ambient media and messaging.

So we created what’s possibly the world’s smallest poster with messaging that could only be viewed through a microscope.

The tiny posters were printed using Litho on a glossy paper so that the ink didn’t smudge or seep into the paper. After loads of test printing the final artwork was set using 0.3pt type! Not only did the world’s smallest poster attract a lot of attention but did the job in getting our app downloaded.

1 in every 3 delegates had downloaded the app. And a massive (6 234) tweets and photos had been posted through it, an average of 1 every 35 seconds. A whopping 1,35 million Design Dollars had been earned collectively, a powerful demonstration of the economic value of creativity. And most importantly, Absa had furtherentrenched itself as the nation’s biggest supporter of design.