Do you have a secret you haven't told anyone? PostSecret—an online community of millions—wants to hear it. Every week, dozens of postcards from around the world make their way to PostSecret, touching on every aspect of the human experience. Amongst the millions of secrets shared, you may recognize yourself—your desires, your longings, your fears, written on a postcard by someone you've never met.
The original idea for PostSecret was simple. It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for ...
Do you have a secret you haven't told anyone? PostSecret—an online community of millions—wants to hear it. Every week, dozens of postcards from around the world make their way to PostSecret, touching on every aspect of the human experience. Amongst the millions of secrets shared, you may recognize yourself—your desires, your longings, your fears, written on a postcard by someone you've never met.
The original idea for PostSecret was simple. It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places, asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously.
The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art, carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional. As Frank says, "secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas-of frailty and heroism-playing out silently in the lives of people all around us, even now. Secrets can take many forms-they can be shocking, or silly, or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity, or with people we'll never meet. When we keep a secret inside, it feels like a wall that separates us from others. But if we can find the courage and the vulnerability, to share our secrets, those walls become bridges."
As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our collective humanity through individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties.
PostSecret creator, Frank Warren introduced the world to a collection of highly-personal and artfully-decorated postcards mailed anonymously from around the world, exposing the soulful secrets we never voice. What started as a community mail art project, quickly exploded in popularity. Since PostSecret's inception in 2004, Warren has received over one million anonymous secrets on homemade postcards.
Warren's project has raised over $1,000,000 for suicide prevention and earned him the Mental Health Advocacy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and an invitation to the White House to share his thoughts on mental wellness in 2013. PostSecret's website is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world and has won three Webby Awards for "Best Blog on the Internet". With over 2,500,000 views, his TED talk is one of the most watched in the popular series. PostSecret postcards have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., and the Visionary Art Museum in Maryland, and there is an album and play based on the project.