A Poster for Social Change

The Assignment

Your assignment is to design a minimal two-colored poster to support one of two social movements that are happening in the world right now. You can design your poster through any style such as typography, photomontage, or illustration. Feel free to execute your poster even with physical material like gouache, collage, and acrylic and then scan them in good quality to manipulate them through design software at the same time.

You can choose one of these topics to work on:

1. Stand with Ukraine

2. Women, Life, Freedom

My Preliminary Research:

I decided to create a poster around the Women, Life, Freedom movement. Following, I did some preliminary research around what is happening in Iran with the movement today. Here are some of my notes:

Women, Life, Freedom.

• Women, Life, Freedom or Women, Life, Liberty is a popular political Kurdish slogan used in both the Kurdish independence and democratic confederalist movements
• During the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, the slogan was used by protestors globally in both the original Kurdish form as well as in Persian

Mahsa Amini

• Amini was arrested on Sept. 13 by the morality police for wearing “tight trousers”
• Two hours after being arrested, Amini was transferred to a hospital and later died there where her family found her
• Global protests sparked around Mahsa Amini’s death and Iranian people took to the streets, not allowing the morality police to swipe the events under the rug

Moodboarding

After doing my preliminary research, I worked to create a cohesive theme that I wanted my poster to surround. Some motifs that I wanted to emulate in my poster were comic books (especially those that feature strong women in them), pop art (drawing from the influence that one of the most famous women, Marilyn Monroe had on culture and art), and the Iranian flag (colors). I also wanted to feature Mahsa Amini in the poster. After brainstorming, I created the following mood board:

Digital Sketches

After moodboarding, I created the following digital iterations:

Chosen Sketches and Feedback

Following our peer feedback session, we decided these two sketches had the most promise:

Some feedback I recieved during our critique was:

• First sketch is great, keep poster
• 2nd sketch: Better stance and model: daughter of protester Minoo Majidi who was killed at the protest
• Use a font without distressing to fill up the white space and make it feel less empty.

Final Iterations

After making the final adjustments and sizing for poster size, I finished the posters for social change.