Last summer I started working on t-shirt designs that call for the stop of the Israeli aggression against Lebanon. As a political tool, they achieved nothing, but then neither did the UN so I’m not so worried. As a design expression, it helped me voice my own feelings at the time and I found that through these simple design exercises, healing could begin. The nightmare that Lebanon is going through is more than what one could easily describe in words. See, it is a serial nightmare, the recurrence of a terrible thing that happened 32 years ago, for a long 15 years period during which my childhood was spent. If anything, this is the return — with a vengence — of the monsters underneath the bed.
Many of my designer friends agree that design is not a career but a way of life, and I fully agree. It is a language that we speak, and this is a weapon of mass communication, much greener that the other one. I do not have the grand vision of solving the Middle East crisis with my own little dash of design here and there. Still, the t-shirts that I did were printed in many different countries and if they could help people cope with the Lebanon trouble the same way they helped me then I would say the design brief has been fulfilled.
I was in Beirut this x-mas and I was introduced to someone who was so angry at what the other “half” is doing that for him the only solution would be colored in red. I asked him if there was ever a solution that did not have red in it? Is it not possible to realise that violence can only bring more violence? No one wins a civil war. We all lose. Unfortunately, war is a successful business model for some people and they seem to get their way. It’s much easier to play on fear and hatred, rather than to build chanels of communication. If there is one book that makes sense of this situtaion, it George Orwell’s 1984. Read it, it’s great!
So, back to design and the t-shirts, they are all archived in the July and August ones. A friend of mind did the one below and it still gets downloaded almost every day. It’s by far the most popular one (I’m of course very jealous).
