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“With a strong background in design and illustration, Anna Garforth’s nifty fingers can work moss into beautiful lettering, cookie dough into edible posters, and rubbish into typographic wonder…”
Thanks to designer friend Tiffany Turkington for this link.
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PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard… I’ve posted about this collective exercise in empathic catharsis several times before.
Victoria, Canada
Life, Death and Graphic Design: The Critical Role of Information Design in Emergencies
Graphic design helps people make decisions. This is a given to designers. We don’t often think about how vital it becomes in an emergency situation. Visual information guides our thinking process, helps us assess personal risk and gain understanding so that we can make informed decisions—decisions which can have a profound impact on our lives. They can mean life or death.
Peggy Cady has written a compelling article that explores the vital importance of information design to the public and aid workers during the disasters in Japan. Access or download an online PDF of the article (4.5 MB, loaded with information graphics and numerous links) here.
Peggy Cady is a graphic designer in Victoria, BC. She is a former national president of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) and a GDC Fellow. Peggy would like this to be shared broadly—please feel free to re-post and distribute any way you wish…
Montreal, Canada
An online gallery showing the worldwide contributions to Mother Tongue (a project of INDIGO, the International Indigenous Design Network) is now available for online viewing, (sorry, links disabled).
—Marshall McLuhan
Manchester, UK
Learn Something Every Day is an ongoing, self-initiated daily project by design studio Young.
Manchester, UK
Brendan Dawes is co-founder of Beep Industries and Executive Creative Director for magneticNorth, a digital design company. Since the early eighties, Brendan has explored the interplay of people, code, design, and art… the grabs shown above are a small sampling from his notes-on-design project.
Boston, Massachusetts
This year’s William A. Dwiggins lecture, “Graphic Guts,” will be presented by friend Luba Lukova at six this evening at the Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall (free admission, presented by the Society of Printers and the Boston Public Library).
Lukova’s distinctive art utilizes metaphors, symbols and economy of line and text to succinctly capture humanity’s elemental themes. She employs accessible metaphors in a concise and iconic way, sometimes using humor to present disturbing issues. Social justice and consciousness have long been part of Lukova’s vocabulary in creating public images that invite social responsibility… her new book, Graphic Guts will be published in June 2011.
More about Luba and her great work here.
Tyuratam, Kazakhstan
Fifty years ago today, on the 12th of April in 1961, the first manned spaceship left our planet from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Soviet Union with a singular and heroic (if somewhat diminutive) man aboard—Yuri Gagarin, the world’s very first “rocket-man” or cosmonaut…
This was the beginning, the blazing of a trail which has now become a road to the cosmos. One after another, spaceships are leaving earth for the wide expanses of the universe. Today, space pilots live and work for months aboard space stations, they fly to the moon; and Soviet and American spacemen have accomplished a joint experimental flight.
In the near future, perhaps, earthmen will go still further, journeying to other planets and universes. But alongside the names of these future explorers there will always rand the name of the first Soviet cosmonaut, for Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in space represented not only a triumph of science and engineering, but also a bursting of the “bounds of possibility,” the breaking of a psychological barrier. It was literally a flight into the unknown.
Being a pilot, he had flown many demanding assignments, including flights at night and in blizzard conditions, and at home they would wait anxiously for his familiar step. Even so, he was never very far from the earth. But now… he had gone out into the unknown where no man had ever been before. Valentina, his wife, well understood all that this entailed but had agreed. And this, too, was an act of heroism for the mother of two small children.
From Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star Town), Yuri had flown to the cosmodrome. It was quiet at his home. The children were asleep. The sky, washed by recent rain, was studded with stars. The night seemed to be waiting for something. The wet pines stood motionless, and the houses merged together in the stillness and bluish darkness. In only one of them shone a yellow rectangle of light…
“Am I happy to be setting off on a cosmic flight?” said Yuri Gagarin in an interview before the start. “Of course. In all ages and epochs people have experienced the greatest happiness in embarking upon new voyages of discovery… I want to dedicate this first cosmic flight to the people of communism—the society which the Soviet people are now already entering upon… I say ‘until we meet again’ to you, dear friends, as we always say to each other when setting off on a long journey. How I should like to embrace you all—my friends and those with whom I am not acquainted, strangers and the people nearest and dearest to me!”
(From a booklet published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1977—which some might call “propaganda?”) Care to ramp up the nostalgic context a little more? Have a listen to the Soviet National Anthem, here.
People of the world!
Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty—not destroy it!
London, United Kingdom
This year, Amnesty International is celebrating half a century of active opposition to human rights abuses… “From community to community in every corner of the world, Amnesty International enables ‘ordinary’ concerned people to work together to protect other people in danger. Change begins each time a single, concerned person speaks out against wrongdoing.”
The Guardian‘s ‘Observer’ has just published a selection of the powerful posters used by Amnesty International over the past 50 years (see more here), including the selection above.
