Earlier in 2012, China launched a crackdown on social media activists and opinion leaders. Hundreds of government critics have been targeted by their online profile photos and arrested, as the government has tried to bring tighter controls of Internet. The crackdown has chilled political discourse and drove many online activists who used to be active on Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging service in China) to start embracing Twitter. Shortly after that, a campaign was launched by some of China’s most high-profile Twitter users, calling on people to use Twitter anonymously as a means to protest against the government’s Internet crackdown. And I was invited to create a poster to illustrate the purpose of this campaign.
The poster, primarily designed in yellow, depicted this objective using the capitalized word: SPEAK. The upper part of the word “SPEAK” has been erased, and the “E” simultaneously turned into “t”, which was known as the Twitter icon. Four different pairs of shoes were featured to lend the poster some playfulness while also symbolizing the campaign participants who used Twitter anonymously.
What was special about this poster design was that people who wanted to participate in this campaign were encouraged to use it as their Twitter profile photos and headers. It helped create an online community identity with a new signature: “Be anonymous, keep tweeting, and speak louder.”
