Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
We launched a kickstarter campaign to produce three new limited-edition anti-Trump propaganda posters. Read about our campaign!
A dispiriting week: the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis as well as the video of a white woman in Central Park calling 911 to falsely claim that an African-American bird-watcher was “threatening her life.”
James Baldwin comes to mind—a passage from “The Fire Next Time” for each of these events. Regarding George Floyd, I think: “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”
As for Amy Cooper in Central Park: “The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
I designed and published the poster “Elvis Ain’t King” in 1992 as a response to the 1991 Rodney King beating and subsequent acquittal of the four L.A.P.D. officers responsible. The title is a reference to both Rodney King and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as to the Public Enemy lyric from “Fight the Power”: “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me.”
The poster notes the disparities between the black experience and the white one; between heroes who are lauded (like Elvis Presley) and heroes who are murdered (Martin Luther King Jr.); between motorists who are simply arrested and those that are beaten first (Rodney King). The glyph on the left half of the poster signifies division.
Unfortunately, white America continues to fail to address its persistent racism. [MF]
Our trademark and wordmark for Touchstone Climbing’s gym Pacific Pipe in Oakland. The type is based on the building’s existing hand-painted signage. Love those chamfered forms!
See all of our logos for Touchstone Climbing under Design is Play Systems.
Old, spurious examples of our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster are currently recirculating on social media. These memes have been investigated (and debunked) multiple times by Snopes and AFP Fact Check, among others.
The urgency and gravity of our original message that Donald Trump is a demagogue with a frightening capacity to incite violence is diluted by memes that trivialize hate.
Read our original design intent for the poster on our September 12, 2016 plog.
We are honored to have worked with our friends at the Letterform Archive and Joel Benson at Dependable Letterpress to design the Archive’s new “Charter Member Keepsake”!
Read about the design and print processes at Letterform Archive news.