Design is Everywhere: We Can Do It.

You know the image. A woman in a red and white polka-dot headscarf, sleeve rolled up, flexing her bicep with a look of pure determination. Above her, four bold words: "We Can Do It!"

Today it's one of the most recognisable images of female strength anywhere in the world. It's on mugs, t-shirts, tote bags, protest placards and magazine covers. It was never actually meant to be any of those things. In fact, almost everything people believe about this poster is wrong.

The image was created by American graphic artist J. Howard Miller, and produced in 1943 for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It wasn't a grand feminist statement. It was internal company morale material, one of a whole series of posters Miller made to keep wartime factory workers productive.

And it was barely seen. The poster went up on the walls of Westinghouse's plants for around two weeks in February 1943, then came straight back down. It wasn't printed for the public, it wasn't a national campaign, and its real message was closer to "Westinghouse employees can do it" than any call to arms for women everywhere. Once its fortnight was up, it vanished into obscurity for the best part of four decades.

Then, in the early 1980s, it resurfaced. The image was republished in connection with the National Archives, and this time it landed in a completely different world. The second-wave feminist movement was in full flow.

The movement claimed it. And in doing so, it gave the poster a meaning its creator never intended. What had been a piece of corporate wartime motivation became a global symbol of female empowerment, resilience and solidarity. By 1994 it was on the cover of Smithsonian magazine. By 1999 it was a US postage stamp. From a factory wall to a feminist emblem, entirely on the strength of the image itself.

Here's where it gets even more interesting, and where it pays to be precise.

For years the woman in the poster was assumed to be a real factory worker. In the 1980s a woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle saw the image and believed she was the model, and for decades that was the accepted story. Then in 2015 the historian James Kimble traced the wartime photograph she'd based her claim on, and found it actually showed a different woman, Naomi Parker Fraley. Fraley had spent years quietly knowing the record was wrong before it was finally corrected. She lived to see it put right, and died in 2018.

There's a further wrinkle too. Miller reportedly didn't tend to work from photographs at all, so it's not even certain the poster was based on any single real person. And despite what almost everyone assumes, this isn't technically "Rosie the Riveter" either. Rosie was a separate wartime character, born from a 1943 song and a famous Norman Rockwell magazine cover. The two images got merged in the public imagination decades later.

For a designer, that tangle is the whole point. Once an image goes out into the world, the world decides what it means.

The "We Can Do It!" poster is the perfect Design is Everywhere story because it shows, better than almost anything, that design doesn't stop working when the designer puts their pen down.

Miller made a functional, forgettable piece of factory motivation. What it became, an enduring symbol of women's strength, was authored by history, by movements and by millions of people who saw themselves in it. The meaning wasn't fixed. It evolved, because a strong, clear, emotionally direct piece of design is an open vessel. People pour their own meaning into it.

That's an incredible thing for a designer to understand. You control the craft, the composition and the clarity. You don't always control the meaning, and sometimes the meaning that finds your work is bigger than anything you set out to say.

A poster made to get factory workers through a shift became the emblem of a movement that hadn't even happened yet. If that isn't proof that design is everywhere, nothing is.

Design is everywhere.

This is part of our Design Is Everywhere series, where we spotlight the designers and design work shaping the world around us. Follow along on Instagram for more.