Poster 4 Tomorrow
Living in Switzerland, you very quickly get used to the constantly recurring popular outrage because of the seemingly maliciously oversimplifying political posters that come along with disputable popular initiatives mostly born in the orbit of the right-conservative Swiss People's Party (SVP). As the producer of those posters the advertising agency Goal has come to a very questionable fame.
The latest example of the agency's creative work was used in the context of the so called «Anti-Minarett Initiative». The initiative for a general ban on the construction of new minarets in Switzerland was unexpectedly accepted by 58% of the voters. International press and also governments reacted with confusion and incomprehension to this apparent act of intolerance. Among the graphic design community especially the poster was discussed controversially–but a bit too little in my opinion.
With this latest experience in mind I was glad to come across the Poster 4 Tomorrow website. For 2009 the founders of the website–according to their manifesto for freedom of expression–invited designers to create posters that support the project's claims. Recently the 100 best creations were selected from the pool of 1834 entries and can be seen in the website's gallery. The selection will be shown in 23 exhibitions all over the world and published in a catalogue.
Even if the vocabulary of metaphors and signs used in the posters' subjects seem a bit worn-out to me, there are some nice examples among those 100 neverhteless praiseworthy efforts to use graphic design as a way to raise the own voice to remind us all of the importance and universal validity of human rights. And this task is sometimes much harder to accomplish than nourishing fears.
So we are back at the beginning of my post, because even in our own free countries we have to coninuously keep an eye on the way we and our political representatives deal with our rights–and the one's of our neighbours. And that's why we have to ask ourselves why there still and every time an equally powerful visual response to the SVP's poster campaigns is missing in Switzerland. It definitely isn't a lack of great graphic designers.
