“How does the inevitable intersection of design and politics make you feel?” I’ve been staring at this question for what feels like twenty hours, I feel a lot of things, and also no things towards this question. If I could choose, I would love to have a design career where none of my designs are for a political statement. I guess scratch that, I don’t want to be involved in the Democratic or Replublican idea of politics. When it comes to the split party idea of politics, the “whose side are you on?”, the “well you’re either with us or you’re against us” side of politics, I’m not about it, and I feel that the current split party politics is very delusional. I’m not a fan of supporting political leaders or movements who are busy dividing us between red and blue than they are uniting us as human beings in our overflowing similarities. Media is nasty, and has only gotten more deceptive, click-baity, and straight up dishonest over the decades that I’ve personally seen. If I were to have any input in political design it would be promoting nobody, it would probably be something close to Banksy’s street art graffiti – the political party as a whole is a scam and almost none of them truly care about any of the people in the country that they’ve “sworn to protect”.
The design of political messages hasn’t ever really caught my attention. I’m not sure if you would consider graffiti artist known by Banksy to be a political designer, but I feel that his work is the closest to political artwork that I have admired or paid attention to. I really enjoy how his pieces make you think, they show the audience’s ignorance into the world of the working class, the 99%, the lower class, the unseen. I’m not even sure how I would get these sorts of messages across as a designer – I suppose through any media or form I decided to, but politics mostly make me depressed so I try to “share” my part, be that Instagram, Facebook, social groups.. But for the most part I’m not designing 8X8 squares of a political belief of mine in hopes it gets virally spread across the internet. Maybe I need to start.
