GOOD magazine is beginning their second annual 50x70 poster contest, "the project that helps social communication". topics to address include child labor, climate change, healthcare deprivation, hiv/aids, nuclear emergency, war on terror, and women's rights violation.
while i definitely think this project is a worthy one, and have made several similar posters myself, i question the effectiveness of this format to actually do anything. do posters work? what does it take for a graphic designer to produce a worthwhile communication that actually reaches an audience effectively?
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Do poster really work? NO they just look pretty. It is my belief that posters are only useful when giving the public information(time,place,etc.) that they need at that time. What I mean is that we become desenitize to posters with a cause we look at it and say poor thing heres a dollar or I'll recycle when I can recycle,but after a short period we don't really care or will forget about it.
What's the alternative to communication that actually reaches an audience effectively? Simply talking to a person about a cause I believe is a solution, and hopeful that person will listen or take the initiative to the cause. Example door to door petitions, huma to human communication. A designer of course probably doesn't want to go door to door or have human to human communication (they are more the human to computer communication)so possibly a graphic designer could designa interactive websites or some digital that all could communicate the cause to. http://apps.facebook.com/causes/help LOL
I've really admired James Victore's approach to designing posters. His self-initiated 'celebrate columbus' poster is powerful proof that posters DO work as they've intended – if correctly taken into consideration. There's so much that contributes to what makes a "good" poster, but I feel that the first thing to consider is the viewer. It's kind of inspiring to think of it as an open window to educate, persuade, inform and evoke emotion. The commodity of the poster has made it difficult for the designers of today to stand out from the crowd. Contemporary advertising has conditioned people to take posters with a 'grain of salt'. A good poster has a unique voice and is anything but monotonous.
I agree that the visual and textual content, as well as the often loud, frank voice that posters speak with can be poignant and inciting, but maybe that is irrelevant when considering that it all resides in what may be ineffective, outdated touchpoint.
No matter how moved I might be after viewing a poster, I can't help but be a little troubled by the fact that 90% of the time I am viewing the poster as a reproduction in a book, online, or in a gallery after the fact. Maybe It's just my particular circumstances, but It's hard to remember the last time I saw one of these well-designed posters, or any poster for that matter, actually hanging in an environment outside the context of "design".
In an interview about his skin-carved AIGA Poster Sagmeister said, "...the cultural poster as we know it from Europe is basically dead in the United States because the cultural poster only works in societies that walk...the only somewhat cultural poster thats left over is the poster that designers push because they like designing posters."
If the poster format is dead, and designers are just having trouble letting it go, perhaps that unique voice it speaks with, that "open window" as Matt called it, can still work as an approach to crafting a message for other applications that better reach today's audiences.
so i'm curious what that media might be. quince mentioned the web, and i think a video "public service announcement" is a valid form that might be roughly equated to the poster. billboards are posters for drivers, to touch on sagmeister's point, but of course very expensive unless you guerrilla-style it. what formats/touchpoints/media have replaced the poster in contemporary society, if any? is quince right that we just need to have human conversations about these issues, and those are much more effective than a poster?
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