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| Issue 5 |
| June 20, 2020 |
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Progress is usually made incrementally. But at this moment, progress seems to be taking larger strides. It is our collective consciousness willing and fighting for social justice that is changing the world. It is through our conversations, art, side hustles, and vigilance. It is how we channel our designer superpower as communicators. Let’s keep doing the work.
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Roger
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| Communication Design |
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Agitprop in times of uncertainty
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Great art can be born out of great unrest. Anti-government, anti-evil propaganda harnesses the frustration and despair people feel in times of crisis. Mark Fox and Angie Wang (aka Design Is Play) are following up their award-winning “Trump 24K Gold-Plated” poster with a new series of anti-Trump agitprop. The pair have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund three posters, “Trump: Lord of the Lies” and a diptych called “White Lies Matter.”
From their Kickstarter page:
We designed Trump: Lord of the Lies to create a succinct mnemonic for Donald Trump’s corruption. Likewise, the White Lies Matter diptych crystallizes Donald Trump’s history of rhetorical flirtations with white supremacists. And after he is voted out of office, this work will add to the body of evidence that many Americans can still tell the difference between what is true, and what is false.
(Side note: I used Design Is Play’s No Trump symbol in my little anti-Trump agitprop, Inside Trump’s Brain, a single-page website to protest then-candidate Trump.)
Protest art is created all around the world. Hong Kong-based designers last year made many compelling posters. Most take the stance of solidarity in the face of an overbearing and overreaching authority. Hence images that reference the Galactic Empire from Star Wars or homages to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Raw defiance gives way to a more hopeful aesthetic from Shepard Fairey’s We the People series from three years ago. Slogans such as “Defend Dignity” and “We the Resilient have been here before” adorn striking portraits of people of color. I remember seeing so many of these during the Women’s March in Los Angeles.
In The New Yorker, Nell Painter highlights a couple of anti-racist artists from the 1960s, photographer Howard L. Bingham who took many pictures of the Black Panther Party, and Emory Douglas:
More intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the The Black Panther newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after week, Douglas’s searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police victimizing a child…
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| Designer Wokeness |
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Empathy is our greatest responsibility. Empathy is a myth.
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Who knows if the designer(s) behind Trump’s Antifa ads understood the cultural sensitivities about the red triangle. But as designers, we have that responsibility to be culturally-aware. The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, recently partnered with Nike to redesign the brand identity for their sports teams, known as the Cavaliers.
Rain Noe writes in Core77:
The unknown designer(s) of the new logo added facets to the V, and added a wavy handle grip to the sabers…” to mimic the serpentine walls”
There was also a serpentine pattern as part of the visual identity. The serpentine walls referenced are eight feet tall. Jefferson designed them to separate the students from the enslaved. They were high so that students didn’t have to see them while attending school.
After some online backlash, the design was refined to remove those serpentine details.
Give A Dose is a website where people are invited to dialogue, which is the best way to gain another perspective. It allows designers, and anyone for that matter, to share their stories, listen to others, and check their biases.
Jesse Weaver argues that design empathy is a myth:
The idea that anyone can design for anyone else gives license for designers to believe that they have some special ability to objectively understand another person. As Design Thinking has spread, more and more companies take this as a justification to ignore the diversity of their teams. After all, with Design Thinking, even mostly white mostly male design teams can design for anyone on the planet simply by “empathizing” with them.
The problem is that this is bullshit. “Design empathy” is a myth. It doesn’t actually exist.
In reality, you can never truly understand another person’s lived experience. Even if they closely resemble you, it can still be a challenge, let alone if they are of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status.
We’ve written a few times about accessibility here before (see issues 001 and 002), and Olu Niyiawosusi says in A List Apart that inclusion and social justice are also intertwined with making the web more accessible.
But wokeness is not the end state, it’s the beginning of a journey. All the tenets of intersectional feminism, web accessibility, and diversity and inclusion are inextricably tied up in making the web a better place, for all and by all. Access to the internet is essential. Staying woke, and acting on that wokeness, is what will lead us to a better internet for everyone.
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| Career Advice |
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So you want to be a UX designer?
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It’s June, and a new wave of design school graduates have hit the job market. As you venture into the workforce, here are a few things that may help you out.
How to get a job as a UX/Product Designer? A peek behind the scenes on how companies hire.
UX design job boards. A list of design job boards, more focused on UX.
That Portfolio Book. A mixed-media “book” that teaches you how to create a successful portfolio.
Nobody told me UX would be like this. The beginning of any career is never as rosy as you thought it might be from the outside. This article prepares you for the inevitable downs you’ll face as a designer.
(Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash)
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