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Saving The World Together For five glorious years it was my pleasure and honour to work with Tommaso Maria Minnetti. A man whose creativity with a Wacom tablet was surpassed only by his skill in the kitchen, a man who once threw a party to celebrate his 'wonderful persona' and whose greatest ability was perhaps the ability to say things like 'I have a heart of gold (eventually)' without blushing.My faithful Italian sidekick and I did many wonderful things together, but what we did best was our work for charity. It made us feel warm inside and our mums proud, it impressed potential girlfriends, and a lot of people said a lot of nice things about it. But of course we didn't do it for any of those reasons. We did it because we believed in doing good things for good people. We still do. |
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Poster for Tomorrow |
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Like anybody with any pretensions to creativity, I like to think that whatever I do makes the world a better place. poster for tomorrow, a non-profit organisation that I co-founded might just actually go some way to doing that. The goal is to stimulate people both in and outside of the graphic design community to make posters on human rights issues. Every year we run a competition based on a human rights issue that affects us all (Freedom of Speech, The Death Penalty, The Right |
To Education, Gender Equality) and the best posters are collected in a catalogue and exhibited around the world. We passionately believe in the power of education, which is why we're big on educating the next generations of graphic design talent, which is why we organise workshops around the world. In 2011 we organised a series of Pan-African workshops across the continent, and in 2012 we received a grant from the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) to organise 16 workshops in |
Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. In the four years we've been going, we've received over 10,000 posters and organised more than 100 exhibitions and workshops. Tommaso and I teaching in Pakistan, 2012 My role is to write the brief for each edition, all the copy for the annual catalogues and most of the promotional materials. Tommaso have also given poster workshops in Morocco and Pakistan, two of the most humbling, inspiring and rewarding experiences of my life. |
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What: Workshops/Catalogues/Exhibitions |
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Good Amsterdam |
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 Tommaso and I had been working on the predecessor to poster for tomorrow, Good 50x70, for a couple of years, when we had the idea to turn a global project into something more efficient and with a more measurable and tangible outcome. With Good50x70 we'd created a vast database of posters open to every charity in the world, but of little practical use to our main sponsors, people like Greenpeace, UNICEF and WWF, who already had international agencies producing work for them. So we |
decided to do a local version of Good50x70, working with local students on briefs for local charities with the best designers in Amsterdam on posters that would be shown all around the city.  The idea basically being to get Amsterdam's graphic design community to come together to do some good for |
the whole city. Happily, the designers said yes, the students said yes, partners like Bizon Buitenreclame agreed to print and display the posters on sites around town for free, and the charities said yes please.The final twist was then instead of a book, all the posters were published in a special edition of Amsterdam's homeless magazine, Z, making sure all the profits went straight to the homeless people selling the magazine. 
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What: Organisation of a poster contest & exhibition |
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