fotofugitive

Calling all graphic designers!

As many of you know, the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers (IGVP) is in the process of building a new website and, more importantly, a community of like minded people committed to the ideals of promoting peace through visual imagery.

Mario Mattei, founder of IGVP has asked that I announce and hold a competition to design icons that represent core values of IGVP. These will be an integral part of the new website and will be used to designate or ‘award’ images and photographers as upholding or representing these values. The 5 awards are as follows:

“This image embodies/ captures/ displays…”

1. Common Humanity – Showing connection, building bridges of peace through images
2. Dignity & Beauty – The inherent quality & value of a human being
3. Local Context – Life among locals, a feeling of “place”
4. Hope for Humanity – Images that show relationships, human resolve, and acts that inspire
5. Mysteriously Emotive – Visual poetry that emotes something unspeakable about the mysterious human experience

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to design graphical representations or interpretations (icons) of these 5 themes, either contained in a square shape, or unbound objects/shapes -not too flat, not too glossy or embossed, but polished looking. Similar to the IGVP leaf.

Icon Specs

Icon submission should be transparent 24bit .pngs (winner provides .psd or .ai);

Icon sizes: 225×225 300dpi, 100×100 72dpi, 40×40 72dpi (submit only the 100×100 72dpi)
Colors: Icons will sit on Grey background hex#1b191a. Cornerstone color options to use for icons are: Green hex#89a843; Orange hex#d48642; Blue hex#4684a9. White and black are suitable in design as well.

Prize

You will receive a free standard membership to visualpeacemakers.org for one year when the new site launches, which will include your own gallery and peacemaker profile page, $150 USD in cash, and your choice of one of David duChemin’s books; Within the Frame, or his newest release, Visionmongers.

Eligibility

To be in the running:

1. Submissions must be received by March 10th, 2010
2. You must be following @IGVP on twitter
3. You must be a fan of IGVP on facebook

Submit

Please use the following form to submit icon designs

Belated though it may be, here is the monthly wallpaper for February. Just a simple one this month. The green background is a verdant rice-field in Xiengkhouang Province, Laos. This province was one of the most heavily bombed during the Vietnam war, and you often see fences and houses made from bomb shells as well as many craters in the surrounding landscape. It is estimated that more than 1.3 million tonnes of ordnance was dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, making it the most bombed country in the world per capita. MAG (Mines Advisory Group) is one of the fantastic organisations working on UXO (unexploded ordnance) clearance in Laos. From their website:

“Up to 30 per cent of some types of ordnance did not detonate. Unexploded ordnance (UXO) still contaminates the ground, affecting a quarter of all villages. There were at least 50,000 UXO casualties between 1964 and mid-2008. Accident records for 2008 are not yet complete, but extrapolating the data already available indicates that there may have been a doubling of casualties from 2007, to about 600.

UXO contamination also keeps people poor by preventing them from using land. It is therefore one of the prime factors limiting long-term development in Lao PDR. It diminishes food security and denies access to basic services, resulting in widespread poverty amongst rural populations.”

- MAG Lao

Be sure to check out the MAG website to find out more about the lifesaving work MAG is doing in Laos and around the world.

As usual, the wallpaper is available in a few different sizes:

January Wallpaper: 1280 x 800 (or click on the image above)
January Wallpaper: 1440 x 900
January Wallpaper: 1920 x 1200