In response to the killing of George Floyd that set off mass protests across the United States, we collaborated with 12 Black typographers and lettering artists to create and release an open pack of 24 protest posters in June 2020 – all free to print and share, and ready to be unleashed into action in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The project was widely covered by media outlets, including Mashable, Culture Type, Design Taxi. The campaign is still ongoing, and the posters are being used in protests and widely shared online, reaching over 200 000 people. Through a series of collaborations, Fine Acts also made it possible for the posters to be sent as postcards, projected on buildings, and turned into gifs, further amplifying the project’s impact.
In the first of our collaborations, we joined forces with Congress cards, a platform where you can customize and mail real postcards to your representatives about the causes you care about. We published a selection of our posters in the form of postcards in support of the #BLM movement. Anyone can pick a card, write a message, and send it to your representative. For every card sent, $1 will be donated to the NAACP Legal Fund.
In preparation for the March on Washington on August 28, 2020, together with our artist crew, we promoted our protest pack as an awesome resource tool for the demonstration that drew hundreds of thousands. The posters are published under a Creative Commons license, which means that they can be directly used, adapted or printed for free for noncommercial use. During the March, we were on the ground giving out hundreds of posters to amplify the message of the protest.
People used social media to urge others to spread the word about our protest poster set to be used in local protests across the country. Supporters shared their printed posters with us.
We also teamed up with Into Action, a movement of designers, illustrators, animators and artists building cultural momentum around civic engagement and the issues affecting our country and world. They transformed our powerful protest pack into a set of gifs that can easily be found on Giphy’s platform through keywords such as “black lives matter”, “protest”, “justice” and “blm”. Not only that, they can directly be used on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
We collaborated with Projection in Protest, a group that projects images to transform spaces and inspire change. They lit up the Brooklyn bridge with a projection of Hust Wilson’s poster “Black Lives Matter” in July in solidarity with ongoing protests at the time.
Not only that, we also joined forces with Kosan, a company that produces ethical travel gear and clothes. We worked with them to produce a human rights apparel collection that features the amazing work of five of the talented Black artists we had a chance to work with on the protest pack. 100% of the profits from their sales goes towards a human rights cause. Besides being featured, each artist got to select which organization to donate the proceeds to. Among the chosen organizations were National Urban League, the largest historic civil rights and urban advocacy group, devoted to empowering communities, Know Your Rights Camp, a free campaign for youth founded by Colin Kaepernick, an American football quarterback and civil rights activist, Build Power, an organization that engages athletes and entertainers to use their platform to advance radical social change, and Black Lives Matters in Nashville.
Thank you to all the 12 artists we teamed up with: Adrian Meadows, Agyei Archer, David Jon Walker, Edinah, Emmanuel Wisdom, Eso Tolson, Gia Graham, Hust Wilson, Jean Carlos Garcia, Kevin Adams, Leandro Assis and Rick Griffith.