On National Voter Registration Day, in advance of the 2018 election on November 6th, Wide Eye launched a poster challenge:
… a broad cohort of American designers have gathered together to produce original works to help GOTV (Get Out The Vote!) and inspire people to the polls on election day. Voting and civic engagement have never been more important, and design and art have an important role to play. All posters below are shareable, downloadable, and printable on a Creative Commons license.
An alternative to good, frustrating, or busy. Some qualifiers:
Culturally
How are things going in the culture you’re living in? How’s your street? Your neighborhood? Your city?
Politically
Local or national, how are the politics as you’re seeing them? What would you like them to be?
Professionally
How’s your work going? Is the day-to-day treating you well? How’s your career looking these days?
Personally
In your personal life, are you growing? Are you fulfilled? Are you living the life you want to live?
I don’t like small talk. Who does? But I often peddle small talk without giving it much thought. It’s like a default. Which bums me out. So I want to be more intentional about my interactions. Having these 4 buckets top of mind, big and broad, I think gives enough of a prompt while allowing the details to be filled in depending on the person you’re talking with. Getting to more meaningful, casual conversation is something I’m concerned with. I can see this setup helping get there.
... as we sang out with the earth ... quiet, then loud ... loud, then quiet ... under the black sky as a human so small, so insignificant, so unable to effect much in the grand scheme of all these things. earth, sky, universe. at once a bright shining beacon, at once someone so common place, at once moving off into the twilight, at once an after thought. here we all were, an established group of stragglers, spouting off to and fro, out into the world landing where we landed without much of a second thought. and then we were gone. separated into the infinite void of space and time and memory. can you paint a single picture of your existence? do you even want to try? what will you force into a drawing you can actually read from a distance? what happens when you zoom in? are those lines refined or are those lines rough? what happens when everything explodes? from the big bang onward, how did we end up here? are we being looked after? are we crafting stories to put something up there overhead? does it comfort us? my alphabet never felt all that complete. it wasn’t enough. if it ever becomes enough, i’d be worried. these aren’t the times to be getting complacent. write your stories because they’re all we ever will have. write them now, and then be gone!
Have you ever been living a moment and thought you must stop, freezing in space and time, whip out your phone and snap a pic with the intention of posting it to any number of social media outlets? Sure you have. I know I have. Many, many times.
So what happened first, social media or my instinct to tell (or show) someone else about something that was happening to me? It’s the latter. The former just being a natural technological extension of our human need to share.
Where do we go from here? Do we get obsessed with sharing everything or do we share only what we want people to see or do we only share things directly with our close friends and family or do we choose to not participate? Depending on the day, maybe all of those?
We are a country of gaps, with an increasing distance between a life of achievement, economic prosperity, career accomplishment, and enriching relationships for some and a life of suffering, squalor, degradation, and loneliness for others. We have chosen to allow these gaps to happen and we let them persist.
Have you ever wandered aimlessly down the aisles of a big box store? So small walking under the weight of so many shelves stacked high with endless makes and models of cheap goods by countless manufacturers. Products waiting to be discarded. It all feels part of a con that goes back decades.
We had just gone to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2 in the theater. A couple friends and I. Afterward, we headed to a small gathering for a few drinks. Also at the gathering were some artsy hipsters who worked at a couple downtown bars. In conversation, it came up we had just seen the film. Asked what I thought, I tried to come up with the words needed to describe my delight; the fight scenes, the soundtrack, the way the story unfolded over blah, blah, blah. As I rambled for a bit, one of the hipster bartenders looked at me intently, paused, and extended his hand out quickly towards my eye. Pluck! An eye for an eye. It was so clear, so succinct. We all grinned, the conversation moved on. That concise motion was a way better explanation for why Kill Bill: Vol. 2 was a great film than my rambling. You can either tell me about The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique or you can show me.
