A variety of people at Flow are often asked to appear on television, to be interviewed on radio, to write for publications and to participate in the judging of awards. In October this year, I was invited to be part of an online jury of 100 design professionals around the world who judged almost 3 500 posters around the theme of “Gender Equality Now!”
The jury was made up of 50 men and 50 women from 50 countries who had a timeframe of 50 days (notice the theme here…) in which to finalise their votes. The online voting system was high-tech and enabled jurors to track the +3 000 posters in their own systems, view other jury members and their selections, and manage a vast number of entries in a relatively easy format.
The poster theme invited designers to reflect on the state of gender equality in the world, or in their surroundings, and to use their design skills to imagine or to encourage a different future where equality was a reality.
The variety of designs I judged was impressive and shared wildly different perceptions of gender and equality in different societies around the world. The winning designs reflected a global society where men are still the dominant gender in work, family, economics and politics, thus underlying the need for designers to be able to express these inequalities in a safe environment.
The 10 final designs, which can viewed online here, are to become part of the permanent collections of 10 highly prominent museums around the world (including the Graphic Design Museum of the Netherlands and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the United Kingdom).
Poster For Tomorrow is a non-profit organisation and the winning posters will be exhibited around the world on International Human Rights Day, 10 December. In the call for entries the organisation stated: “We passionately believe that one poster is a start, but 100, 1 000, constitute a movement that can’t be denied.”
Flow is proud of its involvement in the many juries in which its staff participate and values the contribution that the company can make, in any small way, to the development of design that makes a difference.
