Designed
Dissent
My Honours project, Designed Dissent, is an editorial design project that celebrates Aotearoa’s nuclear-free movement through the protest ephemera it left behind. While researching the history of nuclear-free protests in Aotearoa, I began to uncover a wide range of posters, badges, and other forms of ephemera. I was struck by how clearly these objects demonstrated the relationship between design and protest, and surprised that, as a young designer, I had encountered so little of this material before.
Much of this ephemera was scattered across different online archives, and lacked the sufficient historical or design context, making it difficult to fully understand their significance. This gap became the catalyst for my project. Through editorial design, I brought together the visual language of protest with the historical context, highlighting the role of design in activism. Using bold, uplifting colour, interviews with designers and activists, and a call to create new protest ephemera, the book connects past movements with the present, encouraging young designers to see protest as powerful and relevant today.
This was designed, printed, and bound by myself.