Poster Design for
Girls' Education
in Turkey
project
description:
For our final projects in the Introduction to Graphic Design class, we were asked to pick an issue that we cared about and design a poster advocating for this issue.
design
process:
Coming from a country where still many girls are not sent to school due to gender discrimination originating from conservative religious beliefs, I decided to create poster that will advocate for a gender equality in education specifically in rural regions of Turkey, where such conservative beliefs heavily prevail.
To be able to create a powerful poster that effectively appealed to the specific audience, conservative Turkish parents, I needed to address the root of the issue, which I realized was the Islamic religious beliefs held by those parents who believe that women need to stay at home and care for their children.
As the aim of this poster is to convince parents to send their daughters to school, I used “let her” as a simple yet direct and powerful call to action that calls parents to simply send their daughters to school.
Knowing that it is not easy to change people’s prejudices especially regarding beliefs based on religion and to change these false beliefs concerning this topic, I looked into Quran and sayings by the Prophet hoping to find excerpts that argued for gender equality instead. One of the most striking quotes I found was “Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every Muslim” by the Prophet Muhammad.
“Seeking knowledge
is an obligation upon
every Muslim”
I decided to use this quote as the main slogan for my poster as it clearly showed that Islam does not ordain women to stay at home, but in fact commands that every Muslim, regardless of gender, seeks knowledge.