In the summer of 2008, when Aaron Perry-Zucker ’09 GD got together with Adam Meyer ’09 ID to launch a website called Design for Obama, they had little idea of the ripple effect that would follow. In response to a Design Observer challenge asking what artists and designers could do to support Obama’s candidacy, they created a site where people could post, vote on and print out political posters designed by anyone moved to submit one. More than 400 submissions flooded in during the fall, along with plenty of positive publicity and a few related offers.
One such connection led them to Green Patriot Posters, a new initiative produced by The Canary Project. Launched on July 4, 2008, the Green Patriot site was designed by RISD Graphic Design faculty member John Caserta and his Yale grad school friend Dmitri Siegel, who worked with Ed Morris, founder and executive director of The Canary Project, to create a site that welcomes submissions of contemporary corollaries to WWII-era posters – now designed to mobilize people to help create a sustainable economy. As soon as Morris saw the Design for Obama site, he realized the RISD students had devised just what he needed to encourage more poster submissions for the Canary effort. So he commissioned them to modify their poster-submission programming for use on the Green Patriot site and is introducing the new feature on 2009’s most auspicious day for change: January 20.
“My first experience with RISD was when I gave a talk there in March 2008,” Morris says. “I have given a lot of talks at a lot of schools and nowhere have the students impressed me as much as at RISD. The event was incredibly well organized and the students extremely engaged. I have since had a number of interactions with RISD students, faculty and administrators and know that something really good is happening there. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but RISD students are innovative, informed and not too bogged down in theory to make stuff happen.”
With the new student-programmed feature on the Green Patriot site, the plan is to select the best posters (as determined by online voting and also an expert jury) and distribute them as bus ads, billboards, an exhibition and a book. “We really want to encourage RISD people to submit their designs,” Morris adds.
Meanwhile, some of the best posters the two seniors rounded up through their Design for Obama site were on view in January as part of America’s many Inauguration activities – in Politics by Design: The Art of Inspiration at Dissident Display in Washington, DC, the MANIFEST HOPE: DC juried exhibition organized in part by Shepard Fairey ’92 IL and CAN & DID at Danziger Projects in NYC. For more on the ongoing ripples from their initial site launch, read this Q&A with Perry-Zucker.
