1951 Unknown Troies - profits for the few Labour profits everybody

I set out without a specific question in mind, but a curiosity in what I could learn to change the way I think about design particularly in the current climate. Britain, as well as Labour, was going through large amounts of change in this period. As the nation was remade, we can see those changes through the posters, not only through the revolutionary messaging, like ‘And now - win the peace’ and ‘Top Level Talks – Send Attlee’ but also in the change in aesthetic exhibited in society. Designers were dynamically experimenting to create outcomes that inspired change.

That idea of ‘making a difference’ is something that struck me within this research, the designers were having fun, it was something they believed in. Diehard socialists like Philip Zec and the designers within Labour HQ put their heart into these messages. I believe this element of belief is what produced the largely humane, personable design that we see in this study, it at times wasn’t the most polished, but by necessity and ingenuity they often struck gold, as Dominic Wring points out ‘Labours comparative poverty meant its organisers came up with all the more ingenious and novel approaches to electioneering’.53

I’ve encountered these ideas of humanity and belief coupled with ingenuity in my practice and seen spoken by other designers, Michael Beirut, the designer of Hilary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign spoke of his failings in creating something that wasn’t personable and couldn’t be related to with personal passion, in comparison to the Pussyhats used in protest against Donald Trump,54 their existence is from a personal passion, creativity and activism that is imbued within the design, it becomes an identity in its own right. Political design should come from the heart, it should come from experimentation, rigid rules are the best friends of the designer, and we see Middleton impart these ideas on the party, but there has to be a balance between clean ideas, identity and believing in the work you are producing. The hand-drawn placard means so much more than the corporate march identity, it shifts the focus from the organisation to the individual, it makes it more real.

At the top of this research I spoke about the work of OSPAAAL and the Communist propaganda machine, alongside the unease the left had with the idea of ‘selling’ Socialism, and within posters we talk a lot about the selling of an idea through the medium, Susan Sontag writes about this and the very concept of selling is the antithesis of socialist theory. But do designs that come from the heart, when you believe in selling the theory, does that shift the idea of selling, does that do what the Communists believed was the objective of the poster; to educate and inform. We can take this further and say If design comes from a place of personal activism, does that make the message and the aesthetic stronger, I’d say in the examples of these posters, yes.

From a designers standpoint, there are beautiful examples of design within this body of work, but what has come out of this research is a debate over designers and humanity, beliefs and perspective. In terms of the campaigns that I think are most successful are the ones in which the people can see

53 Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

54 Beirut Michael, ‘Graphic Design In

Party Politics’ (London, 2018).