As the night of Tuesday 8 November 2016 dragged into the early hours of Wednesday morning, people around the globe were readjusting their expectations for what the world would look like over the following four years. The 45th president of the United States would not be Hillary Rodham Clinton, as had been widely predicted, but Donald J Trump. The day after he was inaugurated, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Washington as part of the Women’s March; worldwide, millions attended hundreds of related marches. Since then, Trump’s presidency has been marked by protests.
“It all started with the election – we were like, ‘We need to do something,’” says Jennifer Lippert, editorial director at Princeton Architectural Press in New York. She spotted a blog post showing a sign in a window that said “Everyone Welcome Here” and this sparked an idea: PAP would put out a call for political posters and publish the best as a book, donating the proceeds to non-profit organisations.
“We didn’t want curse words in it, and we didn’t want it to be about Trump – we wanted it to be about the issues,” says Lippert. They received 800 submissions from around the world, covering topics such as climate change, civil rights, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, feminism and gun control. “In the last couple of years there’s been so much happening with protests. Since the election we’ve definitely seen more people engaged in the political environment,” says Lippert.
The 50 posters in the book were chosen on the strength of their graphic design, the clarity of their message and their ability to grab people’s attention. They are also detachable: “The whole point of the book was that they would be hung up – in windows, in shops, in dorm rooms, on front doors, in offices…”
Graphic design activism has a rich history, and when putting the book together, Lippert’s editorial team did extensive research into protest art going back to the 1960s. It found that although there is now much more computer-generated art, other techniques have remained the same – hand-drawn posters and collages are still among the most popular. And while there is now more focus on LGBTQ rights, many of the issues being discussed 50 years ago are still relevant – the environment, peace, equal rights. “It’s hard to think about things not getting better. But I feel like there are so many issues we still have to overcome that we’ve always had to overcome. The biggest, I think, is equality for everybody.”
Lippert remains hopeful: the recent rise in activism, she believes, is a promising sign for the future. “I think when you start taking things away from people – their right to speak out, equality – it sparks a change. People realise that they do have a voice and they need to use it, otherwise change will never happen. I think that’s what we’re seeing now.”
Posters for Change – Tear, Paste, Protest: 50 Removable Posters is published by Princeton Architectural Press on 20 March
