HIROSHIMA APPEALS 1983

🔻 Graphotype 🔻
Category: Poster
Date: 1983
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#f_graphotype
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THE POWER OF DESIGN 🇱🇧 A dedication to Lebanon.

Yasaku Kamekura set the bar high with this entry for the Hiroshima Appeals poster competition, creating one of the most powerful anti-war and anti-nuclear images in history. 

Kamekura was uniquely situated to help shape Japanese design and turn it into a vehicle for culture and commerce. Uncompromising in his pursuit of clarity and beauty in graphic design, Kamekura also took seriously the designer’s role, believing that it should tackle important issues of the day - in this case, the painful subject of Hiroshima’s destruction. Realising that images of skeletons and nuclear mushroom clouds were unlikely to be hung on walls, he proposed an altogether different solutions: a SHOCKING image of burning butterflies, gorgeously multicoloured, but painfully so: flames steal their flight, sending them plummeting downwards, underscoring the fragility of all life and the suffering inflicted by the atomic bomb.

Kamekura, however, remained unsatisfied with the design until the third colour proof, when he trimmed the edges, slicing through a single butterfly to make the composition appear more random and highlighting the arbitrary nature of those caught by the attack.

Kamekura felt deserved wider attention. His most important message, however, is contained in this poster – that designers SHOULD speak the truth to those in power!
Solitude with Lebanon 🇱🇧 JUSTICE will be served!