“Printed posters are visual voices in the urban space. As such they contribute to the negotiation of social norms. They communicate data to the users of this space. They do this by a visual rhetoric chosen by designers. The French city of Grenoble was the first European city to ban commercial advertising from public space in 2014. The only ones left now are aimed at pedestrians and serve to disseminate local news. Do these visual voices give a local visual identity to the cityscape? Such thoughts are interesting for me as a designer. They suggest that designers are responsible for the information that they design and that that contributes to the formation of values within a society.”
Eva-Maria Offermann works in the field of printed design. With this as a starting point, her research interest reaches out to the fields of social design, public space and digital and print publishing. She studied fine arts and design at Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Germany. Since 2012, she has been running her own studio. Additionally, she started working as a visual-communications assistant at Kunsthochschule Kassel in 2013.