Today, friend, illus­tra­tor and designer Aaron Wood brought up on a Face­book chat — had I seen his social media pro­pa­ganda posters yet? As a designer I am always clam­or­ing for a good visual — I pur­sued the link in front of me. I was pleas­antly rewarded by the bold visu­als nes­tled into the Design Milk post. I just had to get more infor­ma­tion which leads me to our Q and A.

Amy: Hi Aaron, I am really excited to chat with you about your social media pro­pa­ganda posters!

Aaron: Hi Amy! It’s great to “sit down” with you and answer some ques­tions that you have.

Amy: Your poster style reminds me of a few design­ers we learned about in our design his­tory classes at A.I.B. (The Art Insti­tute of Boston). What will always stay with me are posters like El Lissitzky’s “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge”  and the Swiss designer Her­bert Mat­ter who designed a series of travel posters using his sig­na­ture pho­tomon­tage style.

Was there a par­tic­u­lar poster artist that cre­ated pro­pa­ganda posters from the early 1900s that was the source of your inspiration?

Aaron: To be hon­est, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” came up on my radar again about a month before I did my designs. That image def­i­nitely influ­enced the first Google+ poster that I did. The first Face­book and Twit­ter images and ver­biage came to me out of gen­eral war pro­pa­ganda posters that I’ve seen through­out the years. The imagery of planes fly­ing over head, talk­ing about doing all you can for the war effort, majes­tic eagles and help­ing out your allies all came together for me. I decided to throw a lit­tle humor in my first set with the Face­book poster’s ref­er­ence for their “Far­mville” type games. For Twit­ter it was play­ing upon the short­ness of the posts you can make there; being lim­ited to only 140 char­ac­ters. Finally, Google+ encour­ages a higher level of social inter­ac­tion with peo­ple “shar­ing” ideas and posts with the share option. This aspect def­i­nitely drummed up the feel­ings of Com­mu­nism and shar­ing every­thing with the community.

Amy: You men­tioned you cre­ated these on your free time. Was cre­at­ing these out of the sheer cre­ative drive or was your inten­tion to make a statement?

Aaron: I cre­ated these mainly from the posts I saw peo­ple mak­ing on a daily basis on Google+ talk­ing about how G+ was in a “war” with Face­book and Twit­ter. Who would win the bat­tle? Who’d come out on top and crush the other two? Which was bet­ter and should war­rant the major­ity of your time?

These sen­ti­ments weighed heav­ily on me, which led me to cre­ate this graphic: https://plus.google.com/114468593663912084118/posts/736MaHGgqom

When I saw that a few weeks later peo­ple were still going at it, I dreamt up the fic­ti­tious “war” posters that these var­i­ous social media net­works would use to drum up sup­port for their side.

I’d say then that the first set is pure state­ment. The fol­low­ing two sets were done out of cre­ativ­ity. How could I build on my orig­i­nal idea? How could I keep the images fresh and still engage people’s imaginations?

Amy: What social media site caught wind of your poster designs first?

Aaron: Once I posted the orig­i­nal set on Google+ they took off. I had the for­tune of hav­ing two peo­ple who are fol­lowed by a LOT of peo­ple share my designs.

Amy: So, who do you think will win the social media “war”?

Aaron: In my opin­ion, I think there won’t be a real clear cut win­ner in this “war.” I think each site offers it’s advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. Since Google+ is the new­comer and has only been around about a month and still isn’t open to the gen­eral pub­lic, it’s much too early to pre­dict how well it will do in six months, a year, or five years. I see each site as a tool to get my design work out there, although I use Face­book the most to keep in touch with my clos­est and old­est friends.

Aaron’s posters are avail­able for pur­chase on Etsy. You can also find Aaron via Google+.