From time to time, I like to revisit some of the not-so-recent stuff I've done, and this time, I'd like to look way in the past ... to 2008. To the My Yard Our Message project, which gave me the chance to combine my interest in politics and design:
In 2008, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, mnartists.org and The UnConvention, a nonpartisan group seeking to foster the free exchange of ideas surrounding that year's political conventions, came together to sponsor My Yard Our Message. This contest took the election-year concept of yard signs and spun it to allow artists, designers and anyone else to submit their designs for yard signs around the theme of "what it means to actively participate in a democracy".
From there, and in true democratic fashion, the public voted on submissions. The top 50 chosen were available to order as a full-sized political yard signs, available for free download and - even better - were printed and placed in the neighborhoods throughout Minneapolis/St. Paul, where the 2008 Republican National Convention was held.
I submitted five signs, and art directed five others with copy written by Scott Eaton, a copywriter friend and colleague. Of our 10 total signs, seven earned a spot in the coveted top 50 (the top seven depicted above). For perspective, there were roughly 300 final submissions and more than 24,000 votes cast.
Though there were several different themes represented in the yard signs, I strived to keep them as simple as possible. Most of the time, your encounters with yard signs come when you're driving by them (or, at the very least, walking by). In other words, they've got to grab your attention - and fast. With that in mind, I wanted to keep the typefaces, colors and imagery simple.
Working under limitations, I've found, can often produce the most creative work. Constraints force you to think in different directions. Take the three signs with blacked-out text, for instance. When Scott wrote them, he wanted to spin our democratic hallmarks on their head. The first read "We're all guilty until proven innocent." The second read "Freedom of speech - who needs it?" And the third read "The right to privacy is overrated."
From there, I wanted to play with the idea of the redacted memo, something we had gotten used to seeing quite a bit of from the Bush administration. Thousands of pages of documents would be released, and massive portions of each page would be blacked out. Turning Scott's copy into miniature redacted memos was both a nod to that occurrence and a solution to the search for a gripping visual. This project was full of those fun decisions. And that's why I'm proud of it, and honored that so many of the submissions were chosen.
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