I used to make posters all the time. It was pre-internet, and I found that if I walked in the room with a big poster with my ideas, people let me speak first. If I wanted to create the agenda, a poster was a guaranteed way to be a leader.

Nowadays, if I want to set the agenda or communicate a lot of ideas in a small space, I use PowerPoint and websites. I believe my obsession with posters was excellent practice for my later career as an information architect and teacher.

This week I have been trying to clean out a bunch of stuff for tomorrow’s yard sale, and I found these posters. Most of them are from when I used to speak about green lifestyles choices to high-school students. I would illustrate the choices on a spectrum of least green to most green.

Here’s a poster I made when applying for a job. It must have been something related to recycling because I sorted my resume into topic areas, and then put the details on recyclables in recycling bins. Perhaps it was for my job at Recycling Together.

This poster lists a bunch of ideas for how we could do community building in our local parks. I’m guessing this was for a story pitch session when I was working at CBC Radio. There are some nifty ideas in there, and I drew it as an image of a park with all the people doing the activities.

I think it’s time to let these posters get recycled now – but here is some documentation of a pre-digital time in my information architecture journey. 🙂