Poor People’s Campaign
About
Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) is a non-violent, direct action movement that means to “confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism”. Originally organized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, PPC continues to rally poor and marginalized people across the country to push for economic justice and moral revival.
The Project
Campaign collateral
Poster + banner design
Illustration
Goals
Myself and several other DMV-based artists were commissioned to create visuals for the 2024 PPC march in Washington, D.C. The graphic elements needed to work across many different formats and both large and small scale––from huge banners that took multiple people to carry, to signage small enough for a child to hold. We also had to ensure each piece was easily replicated by the art-build team, who would be hand-painting and screen printing all the artwork at a massive scale. The final results had to be modular, simple to apply, bold, and use PPC’s verbiage and guidelines for execution.
Waking the Sleeping Giant
We were given relative freedom to create within the outlined specs, and coordinate with the other artists to ensure variety. My approach was to select a slogan from PPC's campaign guidelines that resonated most vividly as an image: “Waking the Sleeping Giant”. This phrase implied a sense of scale and ferocity. Being a non-violent movement, I felt the illustration component of the Sleeping Giant needed to convey both enormity and gentleness. The small scale of the arms coming into view relative to the size of the giant’s head created a sense of scale. I mirrored this with the typography by choosing a variable typeface, which offered a huge amount of variety in weight and height to play with.