Draw me Democracy stole all of the limelight this year, and most of our energy, but the we haven't forgot what started it all: the Pan African Workshops series. The 2012 edition is finally coming up.
German design talent Gotz Gramlich is going to start it up by going to Johannesburg on 11 June for one week workshop at Greenside Design Center College of Design. Keep tuned for more details in the coming days!

During 2011 posterfortomorrow has been running a series of workshops across Africa to give young African designer the chance to work with some of the leading designers in the world.

Now that experience is drawing to a fantabulous final stretch with the last 3 workshops of this edition of the Pan African Workshops project.

Two of these workshops will take place simultaneously - amazing, yes - in Uganda and Guinea, starting on monday 24th of October. In Uganda, Marteen van de Vijfeijken from Netherlands will be hosted by The Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts of Makerere, while in Guinea the Centre of Formation Informatique (CRIFIG) of Mamou will host Bertrand Nicolle from France.

The third and final workshop will happen a bit later, starting on monday 12th of December in Congo, where the Académie des Beaux Arts of Kinshasa will welcome Vincent Janssens from Belgium.

Our fight for the right of education across the whole world continues. Learn more on the rest of our website.

poster for tomorrow’s poster competition for 2011 is open for entries until midnight (CET) on Sunday, July 10th. So as of today, there are still ten more days for you, or anyone else that's interested, to submit a poster on the theme of the right to education for all. You can find more details, and upload your posters at posterfortomorrow.org. Go, go go!

As ever, the best entries as selected by our online and live juries, will be published in a catalogue and exhibited around the world on December 10th, International Human Rights day.
The competition will be judged in two stages: first by an online jury of 100 people from more than 45 different nationalities from a wide variety of professional backgrounds; then second by a 'live' jury of designers in Paris in October.


Pan African Workshop Update
The first set of our Pan African Workshops are complete! 9 workshops have been given in 8 countries across the continent, from Morocco to South Africa, with a huge amount of success. These are just two of the many pieces of positive feedback we had from students on the workshops:

This from Zimbabwe:
"I just want to thank you very much for the wonderful human and designer Götz Gramlich! The students have been blown away by his talent and also his humility! It's an experience they will not forget in their lives and he has opened up their eyes to the myriad of possibility in the world of design."
And this from Botswana:
"I would just like you to know how impressed I have been with Joel in this workshop. It has been a wonderful, instructive and inspirational experience for all - thank you for including us and congratulations on a magical idea."

The good news is that we have three more workshops planned for September in Congo, Uganda, and Burkina Faso. Designers will be announced in September, and these will be the last workshops we arrange for 2011.

New Supporters
We are proud to announce that the French Ministry for Education, youth, social and local community life has become a patron of poster for tomorrow. We hope that together we will develop collaborations and relationships with French colleges, schools and high schools, with the aim of organizing and proposing graphic design workshops based on social topics. Which is great news!

And we are equally proud to say that Institut Polanais in Paris is supporting our 2011 edition. With these new patrons on board we feel that we're moving towards more concrete action and a more tangible outcome every year; we'd like to thank everyone who is already involved and hope that there's much more to come!

From June 13th to 16th, 22 Kenyan students from BIFA (Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts) participated to a workshop organized by poster for tomorrow and held by Antoine Abi Aad, lecturer at the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Beirut.

"Kenya for Japan" is a workshop organized by poster for tomorrow divided to 3 phases: the passive, the active and the interactive.
2011, Japan was devastated by a series of Earthquakes unseen in the Nippon islands since the 1923. Through dozens of competitions supporting Japan, e-communication proved how popular Japan is, moreover, it proved how effective and emotional is this communication. While it was always common to think of financial help when disasters striked, the Japanese case showed a new form of encouragement: the visual support through social networks and supportive websites around the world : Japan might be more in need of human emotions rather than money.

It's with slightly mixed feelings that we announce that the last of our African Workshops is going to start. Mixed because, well, we're sad it's the last, but at the same time we're enormously proud of what we've achieved. Workshops in eight countries across the continent that have produced a wealth (and enormous variety) of experiences and that we hope have been worthwhile for everyone concerned. We're certainly very happy and the feedback we've received has been hugely positive.

And we hope that our last workshop, in Kenya, will be equally as successful. Antoine Abi Aad is currently on his way from Lebanon to Nairobi to lead a workshop at the Buruburu Fine Arts Institute, 13-19 June. He's going to dedicate his workshop to the tragedy in Japan  earlier this year and its aftereffects. Good luck to everyone involved!

This week Joel Holland was in Gaborone, Botswana, Ruth Klotzel at the Stellenbosch Academy, South Africa and Götz Gramlich at the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts in Harare, Zimbabwe

We've received these two quite wonderful pieces of feedback on their work from the course leaders, which are genuinely heart warming. Thanks and congratulations to Joel, Götz and Ruth and everybody else involved.

"I just want to thank you very much for the wonderful human and designer Götz Gramlich! He's an amazing guy in every way and we feel incredibly lucky to have him here! The students have been blown away by his talent and also his humility! It's an experience they will not forget in their lives and he has opened up their eyes to the myriad of possibility in the world of design.

Best, Saki"


"I would just like you to know how impressed I have been with Joel in this workshop. I have a few of my students taking part as well as the designers and it has been a wonderful, instructive and inspirational experience for all - thank you for including us and congratulations on a magical idea - I suspect that this is the norm of response - power to you.

All the best, Steve."

This week we've held workshops in South Africa and Tunisia: at the Durban University of Technology, led by Leandro Castelao and at École Supérior des Sciences et Technologies du Design, led by Florence Robert. 

You might have noticed we're doing our best to keep you posted about our activities in Africa. Now we decided to go to the next level and we put together a 90 seconds video to make it easier to understand what we're trying to put together, and why we'd really appreciate people to lend us a hand.

In case you'd like to help us and a donation is out of your budget, please share the video through your Facebook or Twitter account. A single click might get us a long way.

So here's the video. Many thanks go to ESAV Marrakech students, who not only designed the posters featured in the stop motion sequence, but are the clip's protagonists too. Shout-outs also to video editor Fadi Azzi, and voiceover speaker Johanna Worton.

If you were thinking of putting together a blog entry about our project (thank you, we owe you one) you might as well be interested in checking out our new galleries on Flickr. All the pictures are available in high resolution upon request:
Poster gallery and photo gallery of the Morocco workshop held at ESAV, Marrakech.
Photo gallery of the Ghana workshop held at KNUST University in Kumasi.
Poster gallery and photo gallery of the Ghana workshop held at ISAG, Dubréka.

Here's also a little update about the workshop schedule.

Upcoming workshops:

Nairobi, Kenya
Buruburu Fine Arts Institute, 13-19 June
led by Antoine Abi Aad

Gabarone, Botswana
Maru-a-Pula School | 16-20 May
led by Joel Holland

Durban, South Africa
Durban University of Technology, 9-13 May
led by Leandro Castelao

Stellenbosch, South Africa
Academy of Design and Photography, 16-20 May
led by Ruth Klotzel

Harare, Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, 16-20 May
led by Götz Gramlich

Den Den, Tunisia
École Supérior des Sciences et Technologies du Design, 9-13 May
led by Florence Robert

Cities where there are schools that would like to host our workshops,
but we lack fund to do it:

Bamako, Mali
Ouagadoudou, Burkina Faso
Jaunde, Cameroon
Addis Abeba, Ethiopia
Windhoek, Namibia
Johannesburg, South Africa
Kinshasa, Congo
Luanda, Angola
Lusaka, Zambia

In case you'd like to know it, the music we used as a soundtrack for the video comes from 74 year old Ghanian national Ebo Taylor, who recorded it for his first international release: "Love and Death". The track is available as a free download, and the album is worth every penny. Please check it out at: http://www.ebotaylor-loveanddeath.com/ 

At the start of the week we heard from Vincent Michéa, who's just finished his workshop in Dubreka, Guinea. It's fair to say that he's had a slightly different experience to the previous workshops in Morocco and Ghana.

Internet contact was limited, there was no water or electricity for the duration of the week and temperatures were from 30° to 35° plus humidity. The 28 students made their posters by hand and or finished them in Word (that's Microsoft Word).
Click here to check out the poster gallery we posted on our Facebook page. 
 

This was Vincent's brief report:
"The conditions were very tough and without Souleymane's help, things would have been even more complicated. Everything finished as well as was possible, but the students need everything. There's no material, no budget, nothing."

All of this brings home the reality of what we're doing in Africa and why we feel it's so important to do.

We would like to thank Vincent, Souleymane and everyone who helped put the workshop together and we'd like to remind you that you can still donate to make other workshops in Africa possible this year. Please.

Natalia Delgado has just completed her workshop at the Kwame Nkrumah University. It's quite an incredible story. The long and short of it is that she led two workshops of 75 students over a week, but it's a story that can be told much more eloquently by the series of photos we'll attach to this post and this piece of feedback from a student:

"Poster for tomorrow has really been an eye opener. I was really inspired and enlightened about design in general. I think there is a difference between getting stuff in ones head and being able to teach and getting the stuff and finding the appropriate process to teach it. Natalia was able to deliver and to me is the best teacher and designer I have met so far. Her process and technique really work for me. I hope to seeing her some other time with more stuff. It was really fun having her around. Now that she is going I know I can face the challenge out there. I know that."

To say this is why do poster for tomorrow is perhaps stating the obvious, but, well, these sorts of comments are really heartwarming.

We'd like to thank Natalia for her time and effort, her students for their enthusiasm and congratulate everyone on a great week.

In other news, Vincent left for Guinea on Friday. There hasn't been any water or electricity in Duberka since last tuesday, so we wish him and everyone all the best at a difficult time.

It's a Friday, which means that it's time for an update on our Pan-African workshops! 

 Our Pan-African workshops are rolling…

As we announced last week, we will be hosting a series of workshops across Africa to give young African designers the chance to work with some of the leading designers in the world.

And we're very pleased to announce that Clairefontaine have become a partner of our workshops. They've kindly offered to cover a significant amount of the costs for the workshops, for which we're extremely grateful. But not only that, they will launch a series of academic notebooks with 10 posters from our "Right To Education" poster competition on the cover as part of their longstanding Education campaign. Chapeau!

We're overjoyed to have Clairefontaine as a partner, but at the risk of repeating ourselves, we still need more help to make these workshop happen. We're going to hold workshops in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe, led by a team of leading designers including Reza Abedini (Iran), Michal Batory (France), Yossi Lemel (Israel), Guy Schockaert (Belgium), Niklaus Troxler (Switzerland), amongst others.

The more support we have, the more workshops we can host and the more people we can help. So every little helps! If you would like to support this project you can it by doing a donation through PayPal. Or if you'd like to help in any other way, please let us know! Email Hervé Matine at: news@posterfortomorrow.org

As well as the poster competition, this year for the first time we’ll be running a series of workshops across Africa to give young African designers the chance to work with some of the leading designers in the world.

We believe passionately that young people are the future of the world, and that with these workshops we can provide young African designers with a set of tools and contacts that will give them better access to the international market, and to set up a longer term platform for design in their own countries.

We will host workshops in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. This will be led by a team of leading designers from across the world working in Europe and America, such as Reza Abedini (Iran), Michal Batory (France), Yossi Lemel (Israel), Guy Schockaert (Belgium), Niklaus Troxler (Switzerland), amongst others.

But to do all this, we need help. Financial help to be precise. We’re extremely grateful for any contribution. In return you’ll become a partner of our project and be featured in our annual book that will be published at the end of 2011.

If you would like to support this project you can it by doing a donation through PayPal. If you'd like to help in any other way, please let us know! Email Hervé Matine at: news (at) posterfortomorrow (dot) org
If you would like to know more details, please read the full newsletter, available in French and Spanish too.