beyond policing poster design

My client, Anisha Müller, was organising a panel discussion about alternatives to policing and safe(r) spaces at the university. Anisha works as the Equal Opportunity and Women’s Affairs Officer at weißensee Art School in Berlin, Germany and organises regular events there with feminist and intersectional perspectives.

THE BRIEF

The intended audience was students who want to learn about policing and surveillance in universities, and alternatives to those models. This was during a time of heightened police violence and student protests, and we wanted to highlight optimistic possibilities in the poster, rather than using a potentially triggering image of police violence on campus.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza was a big topic of recent student protests, but the brief specified that this talk was not specifically about repression of anti-genocide activism, but about policing and surveillance in general. So it was important to make sure the poster reflected that.

The university print room recommended we send them a file setup on SRA3 paper, and they would cut it down to A3. Anisha requested an adapted version of the graphic for social media and a smaller Pdf for emailing.

THE PROCESS

I did some brainstorming and sketches thinking about visual representations of transformative justice and safe(r) spaces. We had discussed that a burning police car would be “too violent” for the university setting, but I had an vision of a rusting old police car being used as a planter box for flowers. Tall sunflowers are very common in certain Berlin neighbourhood streets during the summertime, and I always saw them as a symbol of happiness and optimism. So I collaged together a somewhat broken and graffitied riot police van, with a bountiful crop of flowers sprouting from it. Honestly, this illustration was a lot of fun to create.

We decided to go with a fanzine/risograph aesthetic so I reduced the colours of the illustration to yellow, cyan and black, and distressed it, giving more of a low-fi photocopy feel. Lightly distressed (but still readable) typeography was added to match.

Being mostly in German, there were some long words that needed to be fit on the poster. Even though there was a fair amount of text that had to be included, I wanted to create a feeling of spaciousness in the design. This was achieved by including a large central illustration, with plenty of white space. The flower motto was repeated in the graffiti on the van and the abstract shape highlighting the date, time and location of the event. The layout is a bit chaotic in that it doesn’t follow traditional text hierarchy rules – the title is at the bottom of the page and the eye is led in a circle from the image to the title to the event details and back again.