This poster series inspired by the “First Things First Manifesto” (1964) was created in the summer semester 2021 within the typography course by Prof. Eva Kubinyi at the FH Aachen in the Department of design. 

For this project, my team partner Linda Vogt and I addressed the issue of violence against women and focused on public spaces.

The subject is multi-layered, which is why we included several sub-topics. In particular, the very recent “Reclaim these streets” debate is one of the debates that was particularly important to us. “Reclaim these Streets” focuses on the fact that women do not feel safe, especially on their way home at night.

For this reason, we also deal with rape, the understanding of consent and sexual harassment, for example in forms such as “cat calling”. This is a form of verbal sexual harassment when men make inappropriate remarks to women in public spaces or whistle at them.

Femicides are also the subject of our work, as numerous women are still killed every year on the basis of their gender. However, femicide also includes murders that occur as a result of a man’s rejected advances or a break-up against her partner’s will. For fear of possible consequences, many women are even afraid to say “no” in the first place and thus reject a man. As a result, the so-called “victim blaming” can arise. In this case, the blame is placed on the actual victim of the (sexualized) violence.

(Exhibition of our posters created in the Typography and Illustration course in Aachen.)

From our point of view, these problems are rooted in the cultural influences and norms to which we are all exposed since childhood. For example, our gender roles and the way we define masculinity. We think it is important to redefine many of these values and to encourage them. This concerns not only the value of women and girls as human beings with equal rights, but also the value of boys and men within (family) relationships and society in general. Their value should not be in demonstrating strength, being providers or protectors, but in their ability to have healthy, communicative and compassionate relationships with others, for example.

In our eyes, women deserve to feel safe and be able to move freely. We hope to give at least a little push in the right direction with our posters, in which we create awareness for these issues and encourage people to think for a change.

After extensive research on our subject and our visual references, we started the design process with preliminary analog sketches. The purpose of that was to work out what exactly we want to communicate with our posters and what visual means can be used to achieve that.

Our main orientation was the style of the protest posters of the 1960s and 70s, which was also in line with our subject. In addition works by Sister Corita Kent, Faith Ringgold and also Barbara Jones-Hogu, also from the 1960s and 70s, served us as inspiration too.

We find Corita Kent’s works particularly exciting because of the extremely strong color combinations, shapes, printing techniques, and overlays. Following her example, we also experimented with these techniques. In addition, we tried to work with typography in relation to space.

Works from the 1960s often utilized a sense of community, outrage, and “us vs. them”. The point was not to create a beautiful design object, but simply to convey a message. Protest design works best when it is direct and to the point, with little possibility for misinterpretation. The intent was to make strong statements and convey urgent messages in a visual language that is clear, vivid, and emotionally evocative. This is also a key aspect that we took to heart in our work.

The most promising analog drafts were transferred into the digital space for our midterm presentation.

Visual experiments have taken up a lot of space within the course. Following the example of our research on the protest movement and the protest style of the 1960s and 70s, we worked with striking color combinations, fonts, overlays and also illustrations at the beginning.

However, after a while we decided to abandon the usage of color for the next set of drafts and rather focused on the typography in relation to urban spaces. In our experiments we tried to bring typography into all possible forms that are related to the subject of the street, such as stairs, alleys, skyscrapers, walls, shadows from the light of street lamps, tunnels, maps and especially streets themselves. The very places where women do not feel safe.

What we have maintained from our early visual research is primarily the attempt to reach viewers emotionally and directly with our messages avoiding any misunderstandings.

After our numerous visual experiments we made sure that our posters fit together visually. In addition, our overarching statement “Reclaim These Streets” is featured on each of the four posters. In the final steps, we once again tested different color combinations.

Since our topic “Violence Against Women” with focus on public spaces is very multilayered, we have divided it into what we consider to be important sub-topics and distributed them among our four posters.