Young victims of crime inspire memorable graphics.
In October’s Signs of Your Times column, ST featured a gallery of select winners from the Society for Environmental Graphic Design’s (SEGD) annual Design Awards competition. This month, the display of victors from SEGD’s pool of 340 submissions continues.
Thomas Starr, a Boston-based graphic designer, who also teaches a related course at Northeastern University, was alarmed by increasing reports of children killed by violence in the city’s economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Initially, he considered pursuing funding and assistance with erecting a memorial in one of these areas, but a realization changed his focus.
“Roughly 80% of Boston’s violent crime occurs in just three of the city’s 13 neighborhoods,” Starr said. “But, it’s a problem that impacts the whole city. I wanted to find a way to spread the mes¬sage and encourage a conversation to fight these problems. That’s when I decided bus graphics might be a good avenue.”
To protect the privacy of the victims’ families, he referred to them anonymously – Starr simply used quotes from their loved ones and listed birth and death years below.
Of course, these good intentions required means. Starr developed a proposal and gained in-kind contributions from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and Titan Worldwide Advertising, which respectively donated the bus and advertising space. This support helped him earn grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Northeastern to pay for production. Imagic (Burbank, CA) fabricated the exterior graphics on cast 3M film and overlaminate output on a Scotchprint™ system, and Sign*A*Rama’s Kingston, MA franchise produced the bus’s interior graphics on its HP UVR 72 flatbed printer with cardboard stock.
The campaign operated for nine months citywide.
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