Thoughts on American Democracy - The Wolfsonian 2008 Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton uses an individual design style to express her views on democracy in America. She is an American designer, born in Maryland and educated at Cooper Union she specialized in typography. She aimed to bring design to the “masses” at a time, during the 1980s and 1990s when design was considered “esoteric” and “only for very organized people.” One of her books is D.I.Y. – Design It Yourself. She is very interested in challenging the standards of graphic design and is part of the Post-Modern school of Design. She is currently the curator if design for Cooper-Hewitt, a well known design firm and is still active in the design world. In the poster seen here she uses the images of birds, almost in a collage fashion, on a grid style format. She uses handwritten style typography that is placed in complement to the images on the space. She uses whitespace to create a sense of separation between the images and pictures while making a political commentary. She cites various statistics of so called “American Democracy.” One of the statistics is about the incarceration rate of Americans. Next to this text is a bird in a cage, a hand drawn scraggly cage over a collaged bird. It’s this style of manipulation that creates a visually striking poster that is whimsical and delightful to look at, but deals with a very serious subject.