Nifty-50 or 50 ways to design a poster worth its money

30 Jun / 2016 / Inspiration /

What is Nifty Fifty one will wonder before learning the following: nifty-50 refers to the 50 popular large-cap stocks on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s and 1970s. This group of large-cap stocks (with large-cap’ referring to the high market value of shares outstanding of a publicly traded company, equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding with said company) were highly favored by institutional investors for good reason. General Electric, IBM and American Express were some of the most precious stocks to hold and dear. In our case, Nifty-50 is indeed about the value of money for a good cause.

Just like the ‘Fifty’ is credited with propelling the bull market of the early 1970s, Nifty-50 helped raise a serious amount of money because SocioDesign had a brilliant idea. The London based design, strategy, and branding firm asked an international group of creatives to interpret the word “money” in a poster that will be produced in an edition of one and auctioned off with sealed bids. Let’s repeat. 50 designers, 50 posters, one word, that’s what we call a typographic challenge of value literally.

The diversity of the project is refreshing, varying with reason from the strictly typographic through the vibrant illustrative ones to the combination of both. Some entries reference the Monopoly board game, others shout in bold letters “Money Rules the World, sadly this is…shit” whilst Rob Clarke rendered “Moola” in a voluptuous script apt for a word that evokes large amounts. “I decided to be generous when drawing its curves” he explained. Swedish creative agency BVD placed the headline “Yes, of course it hurts” around a heavy poem by Karin Boye about fear, loss, and the ominous side of money and every single individual or team did their best to make a collectable poster worth it’s money and it’s respective weight in 305gsm gold-fleck paper.

Build, Duane Dalton, Graphic Thought Facility, HypeTypeStudio, Spin, Toko and 64 others visionaries of poster design got nifty for Countess Mountbatten Hospice Charity, named after the 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Patricia Edwina Victoria Knatchbull, a British peer, third cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and first cousin to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Atlas, Give