I have been getting a lot of messages about this poster and people really seem interested to know about it, so I modified this page with a lot more stuff, including the process of the poster, and some of the initial ideas. The Design Center at the University of Connecticut (a student run design studio, taken for class credit) was asked to make a poster celebrating Martin Luther King Jr, by the Office of Multicultural and International Affairs. The only guideline that was really given was that the poster should feature a famous quote by MLK.

Early in the process I decided that summing up the life of Martin Luther King into a single quote was absolutely impossible, and that the poster should consist entirely of quotes, all of which still have relevance to the world today.

If you are interested, the Poster Progression is kind of cool, to see where I started with my ideas, and how it went along. Some of the later versions are just minor tweaks to the typography. Pretty much the only idea that stuck it through was the blue color, which I chose to match the background color of the United Nations flag.

Poster Sightings
I've heard that the poster has been appearing everywhere, all over campus, people are even taking them for their rooms and offices! Now it has been progressing to other locations, I hear some folks in Boston apparently have copies, and the Veterans Hospital in West Haven has a few up for show. If anyone happens to see any of them, snap a picture and send it to me! I'd love to put it in my gallery of sightings. The fact that people really like it is wonderful to me, and I am very happy. When we first got the poster project in, my professor said that we'd like to acheive a successful poster, and if it is, people will want to be "stealing" them from public places to put in their own dorms. So I guess we did acheive that!!

Aaah! Here is a letter that we got from someone!
Over the last month, I have really admired the blue-black-white-yellow "MLK Quote" posters in our Bldg (Young). As MLK day has passed and Black History Month is now over, I have (after asking our dept secretary) taken one for myself and a few for the kids of some inner-city African-American friends in the Boston area (because I would hate to think they would just be thrown away at some point). I think if these kids could put these up in their rooms, they would read them over time, be inspired to look up the words they don't know, be infused with the power of love over hate in a manner more conscious than they might otherwise encounter....

But there are more kids' friends than I have copies. I was wondering if you have extra copies. If you are not planning on using them for something else, could I have some more? If you are planning on using them for something else and intended to collect the ones posted here, I will be happy to return to you the three I have. Again, they are so well done, I couldn't think of them being discarded, when they might inspire elsewhere. I took the first one because people had started to paper over it on a public board. As if any other message could be as important....