on Social Design.

There’s no one better than the communications industry at telling people a message and getting them to act on it. But all too often, for one reason or another, its focus is on the work it does for its (paying) clients. As a group of young creatives, we found this situation incredibly frustrating. Three years ago we created Good 50×70 in an effort to redress the balance.

Good 50×70 is a non-profit, independent, international social communication project that aims to provide charities with creativity for free and wake the creative community up to the power they have to be a force for good. When we launched it in 2007, we were only a few people working in the communication industry with an idea but no support whatsoever. Getting the idea off the ground was incredibly hard, as none of the organisations we approached were interested in helping us.

For the first time in our working lives in agencies and design studios, simply having a good idea wasn’t enough. If we wanted Good 50×70 to happen, we had to do it ourselves. It’s the biggest, and most valuable, lesson we’ve learned – how to turn an idea into a reality with your own resources, by sharing it with like-minded people.

The vital help we need to kickstart the project came from the designers we contacted to be part of our jury. Despite the fact we had no official endorsement or funding at this stage, they joined us nonetheless, making it possible for us to give a weight and structure to our project.
Then there was the overwhelming response from the global creative community. We never expected that designers from all over the world would get involved so quickly in our project, and in so many numbers. Although it might not be noticeable from the posters themselves, there is an incredible variety of people participating. In 2008 we had entries from over 150 countries.

To give you an example of how far people would go to send in a poster, there was one Norwegian participant who didn’t work with computers, but wanted to take part. So he sent his entry via fax to his national graphic designers association, who then scanned it and sent it to our website. That really touched us.

As we’re a small initiative, run by a small group of people, it would have never been possible for us to put together all of this on our own. Opening up the project to anyone who wants to collaborate with us has been the driving force behind our growth. Many of the exhibitions or workshops we’ve organized were done with the help of participants, studios or schools connected with them. The result is that Good 50×70 is now a project of collaboration between the design community, the public, and the charities we are working for to produce posters that might make a positive difference to the world.
For our third edition, which is now currently open for entries, it might seem that everything’s exactly the same as in our first – a poster contest run via our website, with briefs set by our endorsing charities confronting seven critical global issues. But things have changed – and it’s something we believe passionately we have to keep on doing to make Good 50×70 as relevant as possible.

This year our intention is to make Good 50×70 easier to participate in, for both creatives and our charities, and on a wider level. That’s why we’ve decided to interview our jury members, starting with Yossi Lemel.

Yossi Lemel interview - What’s a good example of social poster? from Good 50×70 on Vimeo

To start with, we’re opening our database of all the posters entered to any charity that wants them. But what’s really new for 2009 is our plan to organise all of our activities (contest, workshops, exhibitions) on a local level. This means working with local charities, local school and local designers in one city on posters that will be displayed around the city and that will hopefully have a genuine impact on the local community and produce something positive and tangible for the charities involved. We’re currently working on projects in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Suriname, with more to come. The beauty of Good 50×70 is that anyone can (and is more than welcome to) pick it up and make it their own. We hope that the next version the Good 50×70 website will make it easier for collaborations between creatives and charities to blossom.

But back to this year’s contest. As ever, the aim is to produce the best possible work for our charities, to try and stimulate interest and even a solution to the problems they address. To this end, we’d like to improve our activities to produce a catalogue that’s not simply a summary of the competition, but strong enough to be stand on its own.

Above anything we want to do something positive and pro-active for the charities that work with us, and any other charity that works in the same field. And Good 50×70 will keep evolving and growing to meet their needs and ensure that social communication gets the attention it deserves. Which will be good for all of us.

The call for entries for the 2009 contest is closing on the 1st of April. The next stop for Good 50×70’s exhibition will be in Hong Kong at the OC Gallery from the 9th April to 5th May and at the City University Campus from the 27th April to end of May.

By Pasquale Volpe and Tommaso Minnetti, Good 50×70 founders.