Posters of Protest- Talk to the hand!

On a recent visit to the V&A, I came across a very interesting section of posters. It was called 'Posters of Protest' - a collection of posters from the last 100 years. I am still trying to articulate how and why, they still have that powerful magnetic effect that draws you towards them, mildly hypnotic?

What was it about the design, that makes every poster still look fresh? The fonts? The colours? The cut- colour, the silhouettes? black-white- red?  Or the hand?

So strange, that posters and art from all over the world, had these many things in common. So what was the formula?

It is easier for people to stand for what they are against, than what they support. No. Stop. Resist. 

I read in an article, that the use of silhouettes was deeper than just cool 'graphic design'. It was a technique used to condense a group of people into one unified body.

Iconography: The fist. The arresting hand. To me, this was it. All summed up, the clenched fist shouted power, shouted resistance, shouted unity.

What happened to this kind of art? Why don't we see these anyone? Why am I not designing anything like this? No burning issues for protest today? Or is this the new mantra? 

let's keep calm and shut the fuck up.

Fists to Fingers

I was reading this book '100 ideas that changed graphic design'  by Steven Heller, and the pointing finger' idea is No 6.

'When a finger pointed directly at a word or a sentence it was a benign command to read whatever was pointed out.'

 The pointing finger acquired more gravitas when in 1914, at the outset of WW1, British designer Alfred Leete created the famous recruitment poster featuring a picture of the secretary of state of War, pointing directly of of the poster to the viewer above the words 'wants you'. this was the first of many wartime and post war recruitment posters.

Designed to unite or designed to divide, to bring together or break. I absolutely love the power of design.

Discovering the Hunterian

What's super awesome about the city are the free museums. I'm trying to visit as many as I can on the weekends. This Saturday we went to the Hunterian Museum. I had read about the museum on TimeOut, and it sounded interesting.

As we entered we were confronted with enormous glass displays of the weirdest specimens in jars. Animal parts to human, random stuff like an ox heart or a lizards intestines. Dissection of diseased body parts, bones affected with cancer, cross section of a foot! monkey heads, wooden planks with the nervous system, and even a skeleton of an Irish giant! What freaked me out was the foetus in different stages, looked almost alien like.

There were some sections that were truly morbid. Two headed creatures, animals with four legs, John hunter might have been a genius no doubt, but he surely was a freak. And apparently this was not even one fourth of his entire collection. The Historical Surgery Instrument display is totally worth the visit to Hunterian. There are instruments dating back to the 17th century. Some more recent used by the Japanese during the world war.

The collection is so extensive, after a while we were just skimming through the sections, but I can imagine how fascinating it would be for students of science and biology. Or perhaps Dexter.

It's definitely worth a visit once, and when it's free, why not?

 how glorious it must have been