Fans of this blog, Next Day Flyers got in touch to offer free printing of 1,000 standard business cards to one lucky reader. These are glossy, full color, double-sided and would make a nice subversive palm card for a worthy cause. Next Day will include free ground shipping anywhere in the Continental U.S.
Next Day Flyers is an offset printing company that prints posters, flyers, and door hangers.
To enter, leave a comment here before February 28, 11:59PM EST. You must include your email address (though it will not show up publicly on the site) and you must be 18 or over to enter. On March 1, 2010 one commenter will be selected randomly.
Update 3/1:: Comments are now closed. Congratulations Brian!
My interview with Lincoln Cushing, co-author of Agitate! Educate! Organize!: American Labor Posters is up at Design Observer along with a brief slideshow of selections from the book.
We talk about the book, its origins, and the trouble with political posters.
Nearly a year ago, SocialDesignZine (SDZ) published a blog item about design and the city that found its way to the folks in the Provincial Office of Florence. They were intrigued. So what would you like to do about it? they asked. Send us a proposal.
Gianni Sinni and Andrea Rauch, the team behind SDZ proposed a modest conference: a few critics, a few practitioners discussing design for democracy, society and the city. Then silence for eight months.
Finally, two months before the proposed date, funds were approved and the SDZ team swung into action. Both studios engaged their staff: the hall booked, website designed, print materials designed and produced, travel coordinated, and on May 22 and 23 they hosted Più Design Può, more design can. Attendance was free of charge and over 200 students and designers turned up to hear the lineup of Italian and international speakers. No one from the Office of Florence attended.1
The intersections and gaps between designers, the state, and the public ran throughout the discussions. Renewed attention to public utility graphics in the 1970s helped public offices use design in a more consistent way. Design, they realized, characterizes the relationships between citizens and public administration. Now the emphasis has been turning to how cities can facilitate citizen-to-citizen communication in an accessible, inclusive and sustainable way, to promote and enable participation in both social life and public affairs.

An ad I designed for United for Peace & Justice ran in the September 15, 2008 issue of The Nation. The ad runs along side the cover story on the U.S. government’s shameful treatment of veterans.
It’s nicely bold and direct in print. It’s also the first time UfPJ ran with copy I came up with. In the design process I showed a couple of sketches using the text they’d provided, and a couple without.

Here are a couple of previous projects for UfPJ.
While the New York Times generally doesn’t publish pictures of U.S. casualties in its own reporting, it can publish them when the photos themselves are the story (particularly on a Saturday.) The commander of the U.S. Marines in Iraq is seeking to bar photographer Zoriah Miller from all U.S. military facilities around the world for publishing photos on his web site of U.S. Marines (oh, and Iraqi civilians) killed in a June 26, 2008 suicide attack in Garma, Iraq. “Disembedding” journalists and otherwise “managing” them for publishing unfavorable coverage is nothing new. The Committee to Protect Journalists has chronicled ongoing harassment and deaths of journalists in Iraq and BAGnewsNotes has done an excellent job of unpacking the photographs that do make it out.
Looking into Miller’s own portfolio site this image caught my attention:

It has a Banksy-like irony to it: juxtaposing tools of authoritarian force with the values they are rhetorically professed to deliver — and with a faint whiff of commercialism. The vehicle above is a Iraqi Soviet-model MT-LB multi-purpose armored personnel carrier, most likely tagged, I suspect, by a U.S. soldier. But paint that slogan on an U.S. Abrams, and it makes a good stencil idea. Click below to download a PDF.