This is War
Campaign Design | 2020 | Postcard Series, Print
The Context
In 2020, as acts of state-sponsored violence dominated the national conversation, the senior pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Rev. Scott Black Johnston, proposed a sermon series that would engage the crisis head-on. The series needed a visual identity equal to the gravity of its subject — something that could stop a congregation in its tracks and signal that this was not a comfortable series, but a necessary one.
The Work
I designed a postcard series to advertise the campaign, drawing directly on visual details from Pablo Picasso's Guernica — one of the most powerful anti-war artworks in Western art. Rather than illustrating the theme literally or relying on news imagery, I let Picasso's fractured, anguished forms do the work: the screaming figures, the disembodied limbs, the chaos of a world coming apart.
Guernica was itself a response to state-sponsored violence. By pulling details from the painting into a postcard format, the design asked viewers to parallel present day and historical events.
Why It Matters This project sits at the intersection of graphic design, art history, and public engagement — which is precisely the territory I want to work in. Designing with an artwork rather than around it required curatorial thinking: understanding the source material, making responsible and meaningful choices about how to deploy it, and trusting that an audience could meet the work with the seriousness it deserved. These are skills central to exhibition and interpretive design, where the designer's job is to help audiences see art and history in new, urgent ways.