June 2016
Get Out the Vote Poster Call
A series of non-partisan voting posters for AIGA's Get Out the Vote initiative for the 2016 presidential election + an update from 2017
The President makes decisions.
You decide who is President.
Post-election thoughts
The initial shock of the election results dwarfed the sentiment I was trying to achieve with these posters. They felt sadly naïve, designed by someone I couldn't relate to anymore who believed that considered decision making was a given. She accepted that mistakes are always made, even with the wins, and that reactions to both will change over time and with context. But none of that elicited any of the immediacy that now felt crucial. These events which at one time may have extracted some emotion gave me nothing, sat inert in a universe I used to take for granted.
Fast forward a year and we have new nuclear issues to sort out, new infrastructure projects on the horizon, new fuel on the racism fire. This whole series could be redone with decisions made this year, and still it would evoke disparate reactions. In that way, the poster still serves its original purpose of being a non-partisan call to vote.
More problematic is the emphatic "You decide who is president" that now rings hollow for slightly over half of voters. How can we pretend anyone's vote is the deciding factor when our system is set up to avoid exactly that. Maybe the series would be more effective at a local level, safe from the electoral college and closer to home. 2017 has reminded us that those elections are indeed as important.
Give me a holler
© 2018 Emily Hamre