At Upworthy, we know a thing or two about the challenges that come with trying to spread good news in a world that tends to thrive on negativity. There are two main reasons why bad news makes the headlines, whereas the good stuff tends to be hidden on the back page.
First, people have evolved to pay attention to things that could be a potential threat. Hence, why crime, war, and political outrage are usually the top stories of the day. Second, good news sometimes doesn’t happen overnight.
“Obviously sudden, noteworthy, and rare events are the ones that make headlines, whereas long-term slow, steady, incremental progress is just not as interesting,” Chelsea Follett, Editor of Human Progress, another positivity site, told Upworthy.
ICS D, an illustration who prefers to remain anonymous, has created a wonderful Instagram page where they illustrate good news headlines so “so you won’t forget them,” they told Upworthy.
Unnewscessary presents fun, dramatic visualizations of the day’s positive news headlines to show people what they may have missed and to make the stories “easy to remember.”
ICS D started the project in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. They started with a goal of doing 100 illustrations of news items that “cannot be photographed,” but the work soon became an addiction.
They’re proud to have posted dozens of positive news stories over the past two years, even though we’ve been living through a pandemic. “When you look over the whole gallery, given that most of them are good news, you can see what went well in the last two awful years,” they told Upworthy.
Waxworms eat plastic and poop alcohol
The Instagram page has received a lot of positive responses, but ICS D’s favorite was when a scientist contacted them out of the blue. “I got an email from a scientist that told me he’s the one that made the discovery about waxworms that I illustrated. He was in awe!” they said.
ICS D believes that a lot of people are missing out on positive stories because they lack eye-catching share images.
“Some very interesting stories get lost in our feed because they have an ordinary cover picture, like a stock image that doesn’t say much,” they wrote at Behance. “That’s because some subjects are too abstract to be photographed, so editors are pairing them with something neutral and insipid.”
Here are 17 of the most memorable good news illustrations at Unnewscessary. Take a good look, you may have missed these headlines when they first came out.