drew3oooexperiments in modern living: politics, technology, activism & culture

G20 protest imagery and index of goings on

Posted on Friday, 27 March, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Ah, the snap crackle and pop of revolution. It’s in the air again in London as thousands of people prepare to swamp the streets to protest the G20 summit.

Remember when a million or so people marched against the war in Iraq? That sure fixed that.  We can say that we don’t condone the actions that are likely to take place during the week of the G20, but let’s face some hard facts. Interests in favor of the current method of doing things don’t pay much heed to nonviolent demonstration. In fact, they celebrate it, showing it to be a prime example of why their system works: “Look these people can express themselves freely in the caged pens we’ve set up for them way over there. Our way works.” So now and again, sort like the WTo in ’99, things tend to get out of hand as people with other views on how the world should operate don’t get a viable seat at the table where decisions are being made.

I’m a fan of art and graphic design that gets created during periods of transition and upheaval. They just have a lot more to say. With rare exception, I’ve mostly included in the following  events section samples of unaltered text about the demonstrations themselves. So much of it is throw-back jargon from the days of the luddites, the labor protests of the 20s and 30s, anti-fascist campaigsn of European history. We may be entering that period of time when people can no longer say “this generation has never had to go through a depression or world war,” as if it were a bad thing.

First off is a gallery of graphics made in anticipation of the G20 economic summit taking place here in London. Following the jump, a rundown of activities taking place here from my Delicious bookmarks.

Events, actions and demonstrations:

File this one under Activism | Tagged in G20, graphic design, protest | Now you say something

Hand drawn icon set is gorgeous

Posted on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

These hand drawn icons by Janko are great looking.

File this one under Found while Trolling the Web | Tagged in graphic design | Now you say something

Wordle – drew3000.net

Posted on Sunday, 22 February, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

This is the view of my website according to Wordle.

File this one under InterWeb | Tagged in graphic design, seo, web 2.0 | Now you say something

Obama speech quotes put to graphic design

Posted on Wednesday, 21 January, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

To commemorate Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of America, The Guardian commissioned illustrators to depict the most momentous parts of his campaign speeches. Content aside, they point me to some pretty good typography out there to hunt down and add to my font collection. I post this one in honor of scientists everywhere who were ignored for eight years of George W Bush. This was one of my favorite of his statements while on the stump. We’ll see if it still rings true or not four years on, though. — Link

File this one under InterWeb, Politics is everything | Tagged in climate, graphic design, obama, science | Now you say something

ISM website gets a makeover

Posted on Monday, 12 January, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Well for crying out loud it’s about time and what an improvement! The design I made for ISM long ago when I was just learning how WordPress works has been changed by my cohort and it’s about time. hop on over to the International Solidarity Movement’s spiffy new site at palsolidarity.org.

When I worked on it a few years ago, it was a jam session to get the site back up after someone had gone in and maliciously erased it from the server. Thanks to different people keeping files on their own machine, and the magic of InterWeb archiving at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we were able to relaunch the site in a matter of days.

The former design was always meant to be temporary and had outlived its usefulness by years. I was glad to see it replaced with something else as my design and WordPress chops have grown since.

Like the last one, this launch also looks to come as another nasty bit of hackery is taking place against ISM, though. Someone or some people are successfully gaming search engine results against http://palsolidarity.org as a number of stale old articles slamming the organization and some fringe-rightwing low-traffic websites are suddenly getting higher placements. Dear google, please note: ou are being played. It seems that, almost overniight (as of this writing), a google search of “international solidarity movement” doesn’t actually bring up the organization’s official website. It used to come up first, now it’s not coming up at all.

File this one under Activism, InterWeb, My Palestine crush | Tagged in Google, graphic design, International Solidarity Movement | 2 are talking about this

My most favorite Northland Poster Collective posters

Posted on Thursday, 18 September, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Taking a gander at the last two posts, it seems to me this blog is lacking a little in colors that are not black or red. And black is not so much a color as a #000000 that reflects no color.

So, taking a cue from a friend of mine who recently posted his top Northland Poster Collective posters on his socialist network page, I thought I’d rip off the idea and do likewise here. I had sort of let the Collective drop off the map for a while until I saw that list. Based in Minnesota, it’s a fantastic resource for iconic revolutionary imagery and great design inspiration. Plus, they pretty much open their entire library for people to incorporate into their own web works.

File this one under The "This Much I Can Say Is True" Archive | Tagged in Activism, art, graphic design, Northland Poster Collective | Now you say something