Here’s a project! Invented by a classroom full of wild and crazy senior designers from the Minneapolis College or Art and Design is this campaign to fire up the Minneapolis extended community. This is social design. Their first step was this US + THEM poster and flier campaign as seen above (and below); executed over an 18 hour time allotment, they doused downtown, uptown, and Dinkytown Minneapolis. Branding repetition works, it works, it works. And then there were a twisty.

The twisty were World Famous Design Junkies. Your faithful narrator had a funny idea, to take the US + THEM aesthetic and designer up some ironic propaganda, tossing on a WFDJ address for a quick skip ahead to what I thought must be a later step of the US + THEM campaign: clarification under headline, content for the brand.

And then came the real twist. Or rather flip. The leader of the pack, professor Bernard Canniffe (teacher for this class and Design Chair at the MCAD) turned a “ME” sheet into the sun and revealed a third dimension: WE!

The quote from Canniffe on this is as thus:

“The comment of US+THEM by the ME flyers is quite magnificent. The wonderful 18 hour start to finish US+THEM Design Blitz whose focus was to engage and saturate the Minneapolis community is then countered by the ME flyers. That is then countered by turning the ME into WE by holding the flyer to the light and reversing the flyer. The US + THEM + ME + WE is quite beautiful, almost poetic and, I feel, represents the complexity, urgency, and inclusivity of design projects for the common good. We are all in this together. We have started something and we will continue to follow our hearts to bring people together. I am sure, and I would like, people to challenge our work-that’s what art school is about.”

Bang on!

Here’s the nutshelled manifesto of the US + THEM campaign:

Advanced graphic design,
acknowledging the gap
understanding the gap
between the Somali community and Minneapolis.

And below you’ll find a gallery of the efforts of the US + THEM campaign as executed over that 18 hour period mentioned by Canniffe. Stay with us and visit the official SOCIAL DESIGN EDUCATION blog to see how this progresses!

BONUS: find also below images of the ideation process of the classroom as written on whiteboard by Canniffe! Hooray for ideas!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies On The Street category.