Design for anarchists

And after saying all of that your blog still looks like a vagina.

I can be gentle. Just like, if you're posting the do's and donts of anarchist design and your blog is hideous you're kind of asking for it.

[/rant]

I seriously can't belive that so many people didn't realise it was humor...

better to see people talking about design than just plodding on with it in silence.

Though i dont know what the fuck is wrong with anarchists in this country that none of them are graphic designers

Or ship builders. Or coal miners. You think anarchism would do better if it had a pretty picture on the pack? If people are that easily manipulated, it rather defeats the object of the exercise. Applying graphic design to anarchism is a bit like sprinkling talcum powder on dog shit.

I'd suspect there's one or two knocking around the ex-wombles, social centres, etc. end of things judging by some of their output.

Good design takes advantage of human weakness - the way symbols play on the subconscious - not to mention cynically exploiting the fact that 80% of us are simple folks who need to be lead by putting pictures in our heads. Consequently, the whole field is ideologically anachronistic. Anarchists are a bit like trainspotters, they’re not wired like mainstream society and have a different take on its symbolic language.

Ideological positioning, certainly anarchist positioning, won’t grab people regardless of the skin you wrap it in. If it was that easy, it would simply be a matter of paying people for the opportunity to “convince” them.

Autocritique.

Lazy’s a follower of the Ian Bone school of publication (ie. say what people want to hear and design can go hang) – which is good, as far as it goes, but Bone is as much an image salesman as any graphic designer, and fact is that as much as he said what people want to hear in Class War, he also sold it, pics of injured cops, Thatcher with an axe through her head etc.

Graphic design isn’t separate from putting forward ideas, it’s simply another tool for getting people’s attention. Of course it’s no substitute for good content, but that’s a different argument.

Well yes it can be, but it really depends on what startup support you’re getting. If, for example, you’re a six-person crew trying to put out something small (eg. a pamphlet), you can’t expect significant grant funding (and you’re not getting your money back so a loan would be foolish), and most available funding would presumably be needed for the print run.

As such, shelling out £200 for a good bit of design to make it attractive work is a poor use of available capital, particularly if you can do it yourself for free. In the absence of a charismatic marketing brain in this six-person crew to supersede the necessity for good design, they could do worse than run their work past people who know about it, on Libcom or elsewhere.

i can think of at least three

I'd really like to hear from the guy who does prole.info on this topic. You can't read his pamphlets and deny that design can be equally as important as the text.

Design isn't just about style, that's the problem. People seem to think design is just about making stuff look pretty.

It's also about structure, how objects on the page relate to each other and what they do.

For your vagina or your blog?