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Vendor Power!
Candy Chang has written up an excellent overview of her process producing a visual policy brief for Making Policy Public. Street vendors in New York City can be hit with a $1,000 fine for such minor infractions as not displaying their badge prominently enough, or for not placing their cart precisely in relation to the curb or store fronts. To clarify the confusing regulations from multiple NYC agencies, the Street Vendor Project and Center for Urban Pedagogy worked with Candy to create this visual, multi-lingual fold-out poster that demystifies vendor rights and regulations (along with a few fun facts.) Check out Candy’s write-up and download a PDF of the poster. Knowing one’s rights can potentially make a big difference in the lives of street vendors and their families.
7 May 2009 | Ateliers Populaires
Anti-Nazism and the Ateliers Populaires: The Memory of Nazi Collaboration in the Posters of Mai ’68 is an excellent essay on the origins and context of the Ateliers Populaires, a collective poster workshop supporting the striking students and workers in France. Among the things I learned:
- There were several Ateliers Populaires in several cities in France. Paris alone had 6.
- The posters appeared in something of a vacuum, and were all the more shocking because of this. Political posters had not been seen on the streets in 20 years.
- The first posters were originally intended as fine art prints for sale to raise money for the striking workers, not as street art, and were originally printed by offset lithography, a more labor intensive process. These were taken out to the streets by popular demand where they inspired others to do the same.
- The style and simplicity of the designs was a function of both the medium and the conditions of production: the low-tech, improvised silkscreen apparatus and the incredible speed at which they were produced.
- The cheap newsprint paper they printed on were remnants donated by newspaper printers, who couldn't use the last bits of their paper rolls.
- Anyone could submit a design or slogan and designs were argued over collectively.
- Despite the progressive politics, the role of women in the studios was rather regressive.
- In some cases, the artists chose a more provocative poster idea over a more politically sensitive one. The posters comparing the French security apparatus to the Nazis and their tactics were particularly problematic and incendiary.
Grassroots Comics
“Almost any issue, idea or fact can be expressed in a comic. This kind of visual storytelling is flexible, attention-grabbing and relatively inexpensive.”
World Comics is a non-profit organization in Finland and India that promotes the use of local comics as a means for social change. Grassroots Comics: A Development Communication Tool (PDF) is a free, downloadable manual for other non-governmental organizations about developing comics with community activists for use in their campaigns. See examples of grassroots comics in India and Africa, as well as videos and posters from grassroots comics workshops.
(After the demo, the pencils are donated to the public school children.)
Designism 2.0
On September 21, 2006 the Art Director’s Club convened a panel discussion on design and social change. They dubbed it “Designism.”
When I first heard about it, I was not optimistic. I’ve been disappointed before by how professional associations have addressed social design, and the MP3 sat on my desktop for a long, long time. After all, how radical could a professional association actually be when its bread-and-butter is mammon itself?
But after finally listening, I was very nicely surprised. The talk covered a nice, broad range of approaches to design for social change: from Milton Glaser’s big-table, middle-of-the-road approach to Jessica Helfland’s quiet collaborative engagement to James Victore’s more autonomous guerilla style.
But the best surprise of all was George Lois. I’d always loved his work. Those big, provocative Esquire covers are truly classic. But it was a special treat to learn of the progressive motivation behind them, that the man himself was an foul-mouthed, outspoken leftist — and a veteran to boot.
The event and podcast launched a number of bloggy responses and inspired a project or two.
A year later, when asked about a follow up event, Glaser responded: enough talk. This one should be a call to action. Designism 2.0 took place on December 13, 2007.
