How to Make Your Group a Focal Point of Attention

Keep free speech alive, powerful, and peaceful. If people in your community, association, school club, or other group have strong feelings about an issue, help channel their emotions into attention-getting art. That's what the Savannah College of Art did.

As you read this story, imagine how you and your friends could funnel strong emotions away from cricitism and violence and into highly visible art with a hard-to-ignore message.

Five graduate students and their professor used simple imagery to create posters promoting nonviolence during the Group of 8 summit meeting one June in Sea Island, Georgia,.

Wrote Rich: "The project materialized when Scott Boylston, a professor at the Savannah
College of Art and Design <http://www.scad.edu>, rang up the local police to ask if they had any ideas for a class project on social communication."

Scott, also author of *Creative Solutions for Unusual Projects*, thought they'd suggest something like street crime or theft.

Instead, the department's public affairs officer, Bucky Burnseed,
"suggested that the students design posters addressing the issue
of free speech" and that might help protect Savannah's historic
buildings from harm. Local officials expected some 70,000 protestors
to show up during the summit
<http://www.savannahg8summit.org/g8/g8_poster_project.php>.

The professor and his students began by choosing a limited range of
graphic elements. The colors were restricted to blue, orange, and
off-white, "to keep their message direct."

They all chose to use the typeface called Futura because it "has been used by both government and their antagonists." Images were confined to just one of three
symbols: a brick, a hand, or an egg.

One poster featured a photo of a cracked egg, held between a finger
and a thumb and the slogan "Hold It Together." Its designer, Donna
Smith, says the fragility of the egg and yet its function to protect
the life inside represents the idea that "free speech protects us
and is what makes us Americans."

Another poster, by Aaron Shurts, showed "a precariously balanced stack of bricks; one brick sticks out and is highlighted with scribbled orange lines. Arrows pointing to and from the brick are captioned 'Push or Pull?'"

Aaron says he found inspiration from the game Jenga <http://www.jenga.com>, in which players try to pull blocks from a stacked tower without causing it to topple.

Both the professor and his students said they tried to avoid conveying any personal opinions via the project.

1,000 copies of the six posters were displayed on campus, in shop windows, and in city buildings in Savannah.

The cost of printing and distribution was shared by the college and the city of Savannah.

Now, how will you adapt these artful ideas to your cause?