Design Activism (Part 6)

One poster I found that won gold at the UNMUTED poster award, is by Jan Šabach. It shows a raven with a blonde wig and scrawled on top and on the bottom of the page is the word “nevermore”. It is a political poster that refers to a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Raven”, which is a gloomy poem where the narrator is slowly drifting into madness. Therefore, it makes sense that the raven on the poster looks like it has come straight out of a nightmare. The word “nevermore” is used quite a few times to depict the finality and hopelessness of the loss the narrator is facing (namely the death of his beloved Lenore). Jan uses this already famous depiction to mention Donald Trump’s politics. He manages to give the raven Trump’s personality with just one yellow brushstroke to create a wig that looks like his hair. This time the word “nevermore” has a slightly different meaning and refers to somehow ending Trump’s career as a politician at least. With this gothic poem reference, the whole poster becomes a gloomy and dark background. Also the seemingly imperfect brushstrokes add to this feeling. The colour red in the background functions as a signal of warning, showing that there is some kind of danger, but with the red the whole raven image also seems show more anger.

In this case the poster uses Hemingway’s iceberg theory as a reference. This theory was originally created for the new prose, showing that on the surface everything seems to be really simple, while there are hidden depths to the story. This theory was later applied to many different ideas as well. (cf. Johnston, 1984) The poster was created by Leo Lin and as one can see on the bottom it is on the topic of global warming. Even the typography looks as though it is melting. Instead of an iceberg it shows a white human body close to drowning. Similar to the iceberg theory, as well as, the accident of the Titanic, we know that icebergs are usually much bigger underwater than they are on top of the water surface. This is exactly what happens in the image on one hand the iceberg seems to be melting, as can be seen by the rounded edges and only a very small amount of the face being above water. On the other hand the depths of the iceberg still seem to be unknown and unclear since no end can be seen. Therefore, it relates to global warming. The poster was already created in 2009 and is still true today with the global warming, the ice is melting and someday the humans will probably be drowning because of it.