The Protest Poster

Emily Luce

Our arrival in London for the Bad Type conference last year was notably, dare I say it, bad. We were hung over, lost, and nine hours ahead of ourselves. But things turned around during our first venture out from the hotel, when we stumbled upon a huge war protest in place of what should have been, according to our map, Kensington Station.

It was visually stunning. This protest was one of the several ongoing in Europe that reiterated the public outcry over the US and UK involvement in Iraq. Besides the obvious marvel of environmentalists marching beside Muslims marching beside members of the Taoist Tai Chi Society, it was breathtaking to see the enormous abstraction of people organized in blocks of color and type.

Across the pond in the states, the New York Times reporter John Leland noticed the same phenomenon going on.

Pacifists march with fiscal conservatives, traditional liberals with centrists who favor war but only with support. Fittingly, the signs at demonstrations have told a story not of philosophical uniformity but of sprawl:

Straight White Anglo-Saxon Males for Peace.

Capitalist Swing Voter for Peace.

Pro-Life and Anti-War.

Queers Against War in Iraq. (Leland 9.1)

But here at the St. Bride Print Library the contextual sprawl assembles itself into typographic metaphor. This article focuses on the protest poster that is made by hand and documented through news media. We will investigate how protest posters operate individually and with each other, and what the typographically inclined can learn from the masses who make these delightful and disorderly typographic illustrations.

Unlike their printed cousins, protest posters made and carried by marchers in protest are one-offs, reflecting the viewpoint and visual expression only of their carrier. They are made with materials at hand, by hand. They are temporal, functioning only for the topic and event of the moment. They are made for easy transport. Their audience ranges from the objects of their protests, to the media who documents the protesters, to passers-by, to each other.

Critical Mass

During the Great War, graphic artists were enlisted to create propaganda posters in what was noted as the most powerful graphic art seen at the time. These ?weapons for the wall? fought the urgent battle for minds (Ades 7) that has run through the course of the history of propaganda and advertising. Visual culture has ingested this approach to the point where, as passers-by we are so used to being hooked in, convinced and sold, it amalgamates into a loud, colorful blur.

Poster historian Elizabeth Braun asserts that the reason a poster works is because it goes against the primary visual culture of the time. Who can resist the detailed, colorful posters of Barnum and Bailey?s Circus amidst all of that black and white copy? (Heyman: 8) Here in our sleek techno world, where modernism is a style not a movement, the hand-made sign is an anomaly amongst typeset counterparts. When it and its brothers are collected en mass in a protest, the posters? design refutes government, culture, and the very visual framework it is based upon in a one-two punch that strikes first with the look-and-feel of the sign and second with the message. The format of the protest poster works hand in hand with the protest itself. It reacts against the designed world and calls forth an even more immediate form of message-making.

Consider what inspired the recent trend of using handwriting in high end, hip designs in North America over the past couple of years. Handwritten text would show up in places like the MTV music awards and the LA Film Festival, with countless offshoots. On one hand, it could have something to do with the resurgence of drawing in visual art. But perhaps it is more plebian than that. Perhaps professional typographers found the very same strength in the innocence of the hand-written message that we draw from here in the graphic language of protest posters.

Public Outcry

Whether fully informed about their issue or not, the posters and their makers are assertive and genuine. The way they are drawn, the curve of a question mark, or the way a word is colored in, is unwittingly charming. In so many examples, one can see that people have put a lot of time and thought into the best way to express their message on paper. The naivety of the visual expression is compounded by the intensity of the words and phrases.

The power of the protesters? design comes not from the calculated measures from which they created their posters, but from the passion and potential that rests within their work. Like the very protests they illustrate, these posters opt out of planned aggression and deliberate violence, and instead express their ideals in the way their makers would like to read them.

Posters can be very useful as an educational medium in a society like ours. They may even have to be used much more than now, as a means of reaching the people on development issues like literacy, health, and so on. Many people do not want to read long dissertations on issues that affect their lives. They would like to see something that is brief and to the point, something to keep in the memory, take home and act on. Posters fulfill that demand very well. (Mandela: 7)

The ideas of brevity and action to unite a cause go backwards and forwards in protests throughout time. In the US states, Gerard J. DeGroot reports, the first student protest occurred at Harvard in 1766. The issue was the food in the dining hall, that putrefying butter was unacceptable to the students. ??Behold our butter stinketh, and we cannot eat thereof,? went the activists? manifesto.? (DeGroot) The sense of history in the protesters action can be observed even in the graphic language of the marchers? posters. To this day, even topics that have been hashed and rehashed over and over such as abortion, weapons, freedom of speech, are still open for protest, with some phrases being replayed generations later.

Even so, the most obvious change in protest signage across time is that there are many more posters during the marches now. That, and one can argue a marked decline in penmanship.

With so many posters in circulation, there is no standard format to a protest poster. The diversity of the signage reflects the diversity of the protests, and the protesters. These posters form a veritable protest sign medley where we can thread typographic methods and pop culture references into the breakdown of methods and styles.

The simplest and most straightforward in execution are those posters in which a short phrase is depicted boldly on the page. These text-as-image signs appear in countless different forms, ranging from simple black and white lettering to fully coloured, decorated letterforms. It follows that adding an image to such text is a natural occurrence. Then there are the talkers of the protests, those who, even though they are marching, carrying a sign above eye level with slim chances of their sign being photographed, insist upon outlining all of their grievances in one place. These are the text-heavy protesters, those whose history we can playfully trace back to the broadsheet or the royal proclamation. Whereas text-as-image posters and text-and-image posters seem to draw their popular indications from advertising, billboards, and other posters, the text heavy protest sign nods towards newspapers and other temporal yet wordy forms.

In the protest poster we can see evidence of how visual culture has been ingested, processed and reinserted back into circulation. While some rules of typography and design have entered into the protester?s visual vocabulary, others seem to have flown by the wayside. We will see examples of skewed readability, context, spelling, punctuation, and my favorite, emphasis. In these examples, even the most basic rules of communication have been challenged. But where the posters lack grammar, they provide an articulate voice for a movement in society, a movement that is a valuable and necessary counterbalance both typographically and socially.

Meanwhile there are several graphic trends employed by protests all over the world.

The Ubiquitous Banner

There are two things about the wide cloth banner. First, it is big and imposing (and light.) Second, to be readable, the job of carrying it is a shared position. These two reasons make the banner a standard in nearly every protest.

The Ubiquitous Stencil

The history of the stencil can be traced back to cave paintings using leaves and vegetable dyes. While the technology has changed, the process remains tried and true.

The Ubiquitous Color Red

Black, white and red, reliable standbys that have the power to incite design revolution on the web (http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/1439), are used effectively and often, and not just in communist countries.

Small Multiples

Each person lines up sideways holding a large letter on an individual sheet, and the visual effect of people working together are both successful in live protest and when documented on film. For example, S ? H ? A ? M ? E.

Questions

Many protesters write their signs in the form of a question. ?What about my future?? ?Who will write Canada?s laws? Our parliament or the US government??

No

This category was originally called ?Yes and No? but in the end, my inventory of about 20 examples in this category consisted of only one ?yes.? The rest were signs that said things such as ?No More Cutbacks? and ?No! to the Privatization of Health Care.? I had to concede to the obstinate. The nature of the action determines the language of the sign.

Wit & Pun

Wordplay and contextual wit are frequently employed in protest phrases, for instance ?Stop the Crane Drain,? a turn on the phrase ?brain drain? referring to people educated in Canada who head south for more money. This took place at demonstration to raise awareness on protecting wildlife habitats. They aren?t as funny out of context, but are a key component of protest signs.

Wearable Protest

One assumes that having your limbs free is one big reason for pasting your protest signage on your clothes or face, but perhaps these protesters are just wearing their heart on their sleeve.

Coffins and Graves

After sifting through hundreds of images of protests, a dramatic trend has revealed itself in the form of countless faked coffins and graves for topics ranging from education to political freedom to ethically treated animals.

Devils

Similarly, the practice of depicting political leaders as devils or pirates seems to have worldwide appeal.

Part of what makes these visual methods so effective is their strength in numbers. They repeat within one event and move the idea forward from protest to protest. The protester?s enthusiasm and power transmits, eventually leading to critical mass.

It was this quality, watching the hundreds of thousands of signs and flags flying by me in London that was so moving that Sunday afternoon. Adrian Karatnycky noted a similar visual experience to mine in London during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine.

As I walked along Kiev?s Shevchenko Boulevard to my office on the morning after Ukraine?s presidential runoff election late last November, it quickly became clear that something remarkable was happening. The air was bitterly cold, but the streets groaned with activity as thousands of people walked briskly toward the central square. Most wore orange: sweaters, scarves, hats, political buttons. Cars, trucks, and vans were adorned with the orange streamers, bumper stickers, and campaign flags of the Viktor Yushchenko campaign. Drivers urged the marchers on, honking in three-part bursts: Yu-shchen-ko! Yu-shchen-ko! (Karatnycky: 6)

News watchers can attest to the visual power of that peaceful protest. It comes into view with great impact and strength, and then ends, only to start up again in another time and place later on. Observing the London protest from a distance was a turning point in my life as a theoretical designer. In earlier work, I covered the idea of a design in living space and how it functions amongst many other visual arguments, but never before had the arguments appeared so forceful and so transitory. There were thousands of posters walking right by me. Design became alive. As such, it kicks forward the notion that type isn?t temporary because it exists and then it doesn?t. It?s temporary because it moves. It moves through your mind. In the case of a protest poster, it moves physically before your eyes.

The protesters who make their signs are working only for the movement of the moment. Because a protest is an expression of dissent, within the protest poster there is room for dialogue in that moment. Protest posters put ideas into circulation. The sign circulates physically as it moves through the parade route. It circulates through the minds and the eyes of those who view the posters. When a protest poster is photographed it is just expanding its circulation and allowing for even more layers of interpretation. It becomes ingested into visual culture, part of the outflow of society into design, and vice versa.

There are many contemporary academics and journalists who lament that the effectiveness of the modern protest has diminished today (Searcey A16). That protesters? reasons for participating in a demonstration are more social than activist (Lasrson 12). That meekness and apathy are unnerving qualities of this generation of young people who will soon take over running the world. (DeGroot). But you only have to see a protest, or walk in one, to observe the acute power of the simple act of getting together. Even if it?s just to make a bunch of signs and take a long, loud walk, it affirms the right to protest and to generate ideas for one another.

The ideas generated through the signage we see here provide an analogy between the freedom to dissent a government or a social norm, and the freedom to move in type. Through the strength and naivety of these visual forms, the protest poster houses a ton of potential. And the potential to form new ideas, to incite change and exchange information is the very foundation of typography.

Works Cited

Ades, Dawn. The 20th Century Poster: Design of the Avant Garde New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.

DeGroot, Gerard. ?Where Have All the Protests Gone?? The Christian Science Monitor 17 Dec. 1999. eLibrary Plus. Proquest Information and Learning Company. Vancouver Public Library, British Columbia. 12 Sept. 2005 http://elibrary.bigchalk.com/

Heyman, Therese Thau, comp. Posters American Style National Museum of American Art: Smithsonian Institution with Harry Abrams Publishers, 1998.

Karatnycky, Adrian. ?One Independence Square.? The American Scholar 74 (Apr. 2005): 6. eLibrary Plus. Proquest Information and Learning Company. Vancouver Public Library, British Columbia. 12 Sept. 2005 http://elibrary.bigchalk.com

Leland, John. ?A Movement, Yes, but No Counterculture.? The New York Times 23 Mar. 2003 : 9.1. eLibrary Plus. Proquest Information and Learning Company. Vancouver Public Library, British Columbia. 12 Sept. 2005 http://elibrary.bigchalk.com

Mandela, Nelson with The Poster Book Collective. Images of Defiance: South African Resistance Posters of the 1980s. Johannesburg: Raven Press 1991.

Rickards, Maurice. Posters of Protest and Revolution. New York: Walker & Company, 1970.

Searcey, Dionne. ?The Protest Scene: Pom-poms, Pep and Women?s Groups Nationwide Inject Some Attitude in Activism in a ?Creative Resistance? to the GOP?s Policies.? Newsday 25 May 2004: A16. eLibrary Plus. Proquest Information and Learning Company. Vancouver Public Library, British Columbia. 12 Sept. 2005 http://elibrary.bigchalk.com