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From agit-prop to Adbusters, the poster has long been
a popular means of disseminating political and social messages.
While it has often served as a powerful mouthpiece for governments,
dictators, and corporations, it has also provided an inexpensive
and highly visible platform for grassroots and counter-culture movements.
"Poster design is a very public activity," argues Scott
Boylston, Professor of Graphic Design at Savannah College of Art
and Design, "Why not address the public about public concerns?"
Last spring, Boylston called up the Savannah police
department and asked them to name their top public safety concerns.
Number one on their list was the upcoming G8 Summit on Sea Island,
off the coast of Georgia. A gathering of leaders from the eight
most economically powerful nations in the world, the Summit is a
magnet for anti-globalization protestors. Savannah, as the nearest
metropolitan center, would be their home base. Due to the violent
nature of past protests, both tensions and security were high.
In response, Boylston assigned a group project in
his MFA Poster Design class: create a suite of posters to remind
both protestors and police to respect First Amendment rights of
free speech and peaceable assembly. The result was the Freedom of
Assembly Posters.
Seven students -- Amanda Dieter, Kelly Koon, Shannon
Pickett, Nick Prokhorov, Chris Risdon, Aaron Shurts, and Donna Smith
-- worked collectively to come up with unifying colors, symbols
and a typeface. In addition to neutrals and black, they selected
blue, for its peaceful, soothing connotations, and orange, for its
eye-catching quality. They chose three evocative symbols -- a brick,
a hand, and an egg -- that could suggest either hope and progress
or destruction and violence. Futura was selected as the typeface,
both for its legibility and historical resonance. "We were
not allowed to leave [the class] until we all agreed," Pickett
recalls, "We seemed to go back and forth forever. But in the
end we were all happy with our choices." The students then
used these common elements to create individual posters interpreting
the project's ideals of non-violence and free expression.
Despite his own history of activism through graphic
arts, Boylston urged his students to maintain a neutral, mediating
stance between the city and the protestors. As a result, the posters
are more nuanced, open-ended and suggestive than most agit-prop
works. "The posters didn't scream 'behave' to the viewer,"
observed Smith, "instead they asked the viewer to think and
draw their own conclusions." Her poster features an image of
a hand holding a cracked egg. Inscribed on the egg's surface are
the words "Hold it together," acknowledging the volatility
of the situation and exhorting the viewer not to let it explode
into violence.
The class presented the designs to Savannah officials,
who were so enthused that they arranged to have 5,000 posters printed
and displayed around town in the week before the Summit. The posters
were also presented to the lead protest organizer, who often used
them as a backdrop for his press conferences. "The fact that
both 'sides' were absolutely thrilled with the results was the best
news we could have ever heard," commented Boylston, "Our
primary goal, after all, was to unify these otherwise divided groups."
However, the project had its share of controversy.
According to the students, the city rejected two of the poster designs
without explanation, refusing to print and distribute them. Notably,
the rejected designs both dealt with the dual role of the brick
as building material and weapon. Risdon's poster is simply an image
of a brick on a flat orange ground with the words "BUILDESTROY"
beneath it, while Pickett's poses the question "Tool?"
next to an image of a man holding a brick in his hand. While intended
to encourage viewers to ponder the possibilities before taking action,
the posters were perhaps a little too suggestive for cautious Savannah
authorities.
Eventually, all of the posters found a life outside
of Savannah. An ethics consulting firm in Boston ordered 4,000 for
use during the Democratic National Convention. 1,000 of these were
then sent to New York in time for the Republican Convention. This
versatility attests not only to the broad appeal and importance
of the posters' messages, but to the skillfulness and subtlety of
their design. They prove that design has the power, not only to
advocate, but to mediate, to explore both sides of an issue at once.
By encapsulating complex ideas in an elegant and striking format,
the Freedom of Assembly posters open new avenues of peaceful communication.
Convinced that poster design could make a meaningful,
public difference, the students organized themselves into a collective
called nuidea (www.nuidea.org). From there, a few have gone on to
form their own politically oriented design projects. Pickett and
Risdon launched a more confrontational offshoot, ScrewIdea (www.screwidea.com),
to design posters addressing issues such as voting, underage smoking,
and information privacy. Shurts created noncense.com, an anti-censorship
Web site where visitors can submit their own poster designs for
inclusion in both an online gallery and an exhibition. What began
as a humble class project has quickly become a socially conscious
design community. Pickett asserts, "I would just like to urge
all professors to show their students how to become proactive as
designers in society and…how rewarding it can be to see change
because of it."
This article originally appeared
in the Winter, 2004 issue of CMYK.
Reprinted with permission.
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