Cazenovia College Student, Felicity Jones, Wins National Poster Contest

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Felicity Jones displays her winning poster design.

CAZENOVIA, NY (02/10/2011)(readMedia)-- Felicity Jones, originally from Hartford, N.Y., and a graduate of Hartford High School, has won first place in the "2011 Lend a Hand" National Poster Contest with her poster "Being Thrifty is Nifty." Jones, who now resides in Cazenovia, is a senior in Cazenovia College's Visual Communications Program. "I am extremely honored to have won the contest, but," says Jones, "as a firm believer in all things handmade, I was even more excited to have my design printed using the letterpress technique."

The project, sponsored by "Tending a Difficult Hope" invited students to create a poster to inspire their generation to make healthy sustainable choices, and to work together for the common good. The students were to use a specific poster from the WW1 or WWII era, or any poster from the online Beans Are Bullets (war era food posters) exhibition as inspiration for their designs.

Jones says, "I enjoyed the research portion of the project as much as actually designing it. I was very inspired by the color palettes and typography used in posters from the WWII era."

All the students in the College's Graphic Design and Social Change class, taught by Laurie Selleck, associate professor of visual communications, took part in the contest. Their posters will be part of a traveling group exhibition that will include all the posters submitted to the contest. Details about the exhibition will be announced at www.leahgauthier.com/tendingadifficulthope. The winning entries are posted on this site, and letterpress posters may be ordered as well.

Selleck says, "This contest was a great opportunity for students to put the skills and techniques they learned in class into practice for a good cause, a cause focused on empowering their generation. It is exciting to see that Felicity's work will be part of an effort to effect positive social change through design. Her bold, inspired poster, laden with cultural resonance and developed with careful attention to detail, distinguished her work from a field of strong entries. We in the Visual Communications Program, her professors and classmates, are very proud of her accomplishments and look forward to seeing the whole show."

Tending a Difficult Hope is an ongoing art installation project by artist Leah Gauthier at the SoFA Gallery at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Six designs from around the country were selected to be letterpress printed in editions of 500 by Kyle Durrie of Power & Light Press, in Portland, Oregon, which will be available for purchase.

Each artist will be paid one third of the sales price for each print sold (estimated sales price $30-$50 per print depending on number of colors). One third will go towards costs (printing, marketing, shipping, handling), and the final third will be donated to Tending a Difficult Hope DIY public programming workshops. One print will be released for sale to the public every two months in 2011.

Photo: Felicity Jones displays her winning poster design.

(Photo by Kate Walsh, a senior fashion design major at Cazenovia College.)

Cazenovia College, named one of "America's Best Colleges" by US News & World Report, is an independent, co-educational, baccalaureate college, located near Syracuse, N.Y. Cazenovia, selected as a College of Distinction by www.collegesofdistinction.com, offers a comprehensive liberal arts education in an exceptional community environment, with academic and co-curricular programs devoted to developing leaders in their professional fields. For more information, visit www.cazenovia.edu.

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