The Occupied Times

The Occupied Times shows the future of protest, graphic design, and for London’s news industries.

This month the Occupy London movement published the eighth edition of its newspaper, The Occupied Times of London. First published in October, the paper is now a 20-page weekly edition. 2,000 copies are distributed amongst their main sites in London.

 

The future for protest

And for a protest movement production, it has incredible graphic design.

 

They’ve used corporate branding to make an accessible, interesting paper that people from outside the movement would want to read. Too many protest graphics are designed to talk only to those already involved in political movements, says Tzortzis Rallis, one of the designers of the paper.

"Protest collectives are often limited in terms of their communications," says Rallis, "and in the mainstream media they are often presented incorrectly, even as terrorists in some cases. But graphic design is a way to make people realise that these movements are not like that, that you can present the cause in a better way and make it more approachable to different people."

 

The future for design

This might be a pretty big aim for what is basically a new approach to a typeface. They have used two together - one corporate, one not. Putting these next to each other is credited by the magazine Creative Review as having “chimed cleverly with the 'occupying' metaphor.”

 

It may chime more cleverly with a graphic design magazine than with most of its readership. But
Rallis makes a stronger point. "Brands are now using the visual language of protest themselves, with stencils etc, to promote their products – they stole that language – so we are stealing theirs."

 

But for news?

And why is it the future for news? Because it’s local, targeted and crowdsourced. Funding has been sourced online via Sponsume, raising over £2,000 to keep the newspaper going. This is an innovative approach that is suitably anti-big business.

One project that’s the future for protest, design and news? It’s enough to keep you occupied.

 

You can get The Occupied Times of London is from the current occupations by St Paul’s Cathedral of Finsbury Square, EC2 or as PDFs from theoccupiedtimes.co.uk.