This is part of a series on nonviolent protest methods, which explains approaches and provides inspirational examples from history. For additional resources, please explore the Museum of Protest’s activist guides and view items in the collection.

Visual displays have shaped the course of history’s most consequential struggles for justice. From the hand-stitched suffragette banners of Edwardian England to guerrilla light projections on Trump-branded hotels, displayed communications represent one of the most accessible and enduring forms of nonviolent resistance.

In Gene Sharp’s influential framework of 198 nonviolent action methods, banners, posters, and displayed communications occupy Method #8 under “Communications with a Wider Audience”—tools that bypass official channels to speak directly to the public and undermine a regime’s narrative control.

These visual methods work because they transform public spaces into sites of contestation. A single well-designed banner can communicate demands to thousands of passersby, create an iconic image that travels through media coverage, and build solidarity among protesters who gather beneath shared symbols. The most effective displayed communications combine immediate clarity with emotional resonance, turning complex political demands into instantly recognizable calls to action.

The suffragettes pioneered modern protest visuals

The modern tradition of coordinated protest banners emerged from the British and American women’s suffrage movements. In 1907, artist Mary Lowndes founded the Artists’ Suffrage League specifically to create professional visual materials for the cause. She described an ideal banner as “a thing to float in the wind, to flicker in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure”—not just a message board but an aesthetic object designed to attract attention and inspire.

The Women’s Social and Political Union adopted a carefully considered color scheme: purple for dignity, white for purity, and green for hope. These colors appeared on banners, sashes, and badges, creating immediate visual unity at demonstrations. When 500,000 people gathered for the Women’s Sunday rally in Hyde Park on June 21, 1908, the coordinated purple, white, and green created a sea of unified visual identity that proclaimed the movement’s organization and seriousness.

In America, the “Silent Sentinels” began picketing the White House on January 10, 1917—the first group ever to do so. Over 2,000 women eventually participated, with nearly 500 arrested and 168 jailed. Their banners grew increasingly pointed: “Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty?” escalated to the “Kaiser Wilson” banner comparing President Wilson to the German enemy. When activist Alice Paul was arrested on October 20, 1917, she carried a banner quoting Wilson’s own words back at him: “The time has come to conquer or submit. For us there is but one choice. We have made it.”

The suffragettes’ innovation was understanding that banners could provoke authorities into overreaction, generating sympathy. After the Night of Terror on November 14, 1917, when guards at Occoquan Workhouse brutalized 40 imprisoned suffragists, public opinion shifted decisively. Wilson endorsed the 19th Amendment within months.

Simple slogans carry movements further than complex arguments

The most enduring protest messages share a common quality: they are short enough to read instantly yet resonant enough to echo. “I AM A MAN” became the defining image of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike after organizer William Lucy, then 34 years old, proposed the phrase. “We came up with the sign that simply said, in four words, ‘I Am a Man,'” Lucy recalled in 2021. “It was the shortest phrase that we could get that would instill in them a sense of pride.”

Youth volunteers assembled the signs in a church attic, using poster board with large black letters. The message deliberately echoed 19th-century abolitionist rhetoric (“Am I not a man and a brother?”) while speaking to the immediate indignity of Black sanitation workers crushed by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to support the strike and delivered his final “Mountaintop” speech. The phrase now exists as a typeface called “Martin.”

The 1963 March on Washington demonstrates another approach: unified messaging through coordinated sign distribution. Organizers provided pre-made signs reading “We March for Jobs for All Now” and “We Demand Voting Rights Now” so that over 200,000 participants spoke with a unified visual voice. This coordination ensured that photographers captured coherent demands rather than a cacophony of individual messages.

Some of history’s most effective slogans emerged spontaneously in response to specific moments. During Chile’s 2019 estallido social, after the government raised subway fares by 30 pesos, protesters chanted and displayed: “No son 30 pesos, son 30 años” (It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years)—connecting a small fare increase to three decades of inequality since Pinochet’s dictatorship. Over 1.2 million people marched in Santiago on October 25, 2019, the largest protest in Chilean history.

Physical materials have evolved from silk embroidery to spray paint

The earliest trade union and suffrage banners were works of art. The 1889 London Dockers’ Strike banner depicted Hercules wrestling a serpent representing capitalism, rendered in professional craftsmanship. The oldest known trade union banner, created in 1821 for the Tin Plate Workers Society, was made by silk embroiderer William Dixon. Suffragette banners featured appliquéd flowers, stenciled names, and silk imported from India.

Industrial production and new materials democratized banner-making through the 20th century. The Paris Atelier Populaire of May 1968 revolutionized protest graphics by establishing a collective silkscreen workshop in the occupied École des Beaux Arts. Beginning May 14, 1968, anonymous artists produced up to 2,000 posters at a time, refusing to sign individual works. Their output included the iconic “La lutte continue” (The Struggle Continues)—a factory silhouette with a raised fist emerging from the smokestack. The workshop operated until police raided it on June 27, 1968.

Edward Seymour’s 1949 invention of spray paint gave rise to modern political graffiti. The Berlin Wall’s western face became a canvas of vibrant resistance imagery while the eastern side remained gray—graffiti was a crime there. The anarcho-punk band Crass stenciled anti-war, anarchist, and feminist messages throughout the London Underground system in the late 1970s, establishing stencils as an activist tool. The technique’s advantages are obvious: quick application, endless mechanical reproduction from a single template, and a clean graphic quality that mimics official signage.

Today’s protesters can choose from foam core, poster board, recycled cardboard, PVC boards, scaffolding mesh, billboard tarps, and professional vinyl printing. Pool noodles have replaced wooden sticks as handles at many protests after authorities banned potential weapons.

Graffiti and murals transform walls into permanent witnesses

When walls become contested territory, they accumulate the visual history of struggle. Belfast’s “peace walls”—97 separate barriers totaling over 21 miles of structures up to 25 feet high—began as temporary structures in 1969 and became permanent canvases for murals documenting Northern Ireland’s Troubles. The Bobby Sands mural on Falls Road commemorates the hunger striker who died in prison in 1981. The International Wall on Divis Street features rotating political murals supporting causes worldwide.

The 700-kilometer separation barrier in the West Bank, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, has attracted international artists including Banksy. His works there include a dove in a bulletproof vest, a little girl frisking a soldier, and children with buckets and spades peering through a crack at a tropical beach. Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid’s 14-meter work scrambles Arabic letters spelling out the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.

Yet the ethics of painting on the wall are contested. When Banksy visited in 2005, a Palestinian man told him: “We don’t want this wall to be beautiful. We hate it. Go home.” Palestinian activist Amany Khalifa has criticized “spraycation” tourism where international visitors appreciate the aesthetics without understanding the lived reality of occupation.

Mexico’s muralist movement shows how protest art can become official history. After the 1910-1920 revolution, the government commissioned Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint massive public murals educating a largely illiterate population. Rivera’s communist convictions led to one of art history’s most famous censorship incidents: Nelson Rockefeller commissioned him to paint the lobby of the RCA Building in New York, then had the mural destroyed after Rivera included Vladimir Lenin’s portrait.

White headscarves and three-finger salutes show how symbols travel across movements

Visual symbols often carry meaning beyond their original context. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo began wearing white headscarves in 1977 after Argentina’s military junta “disappeared” their children. The scarves were originally made from cloth diapers, symbolizing their children while refusing the black of mourning until they knew their children’s fate. Founder Azucena Villaflor was herself kidnapped and murdered in December 1977, but the Thursday marches continue—the mothers have circled the Pirámide de Mayo over 2,392 times as of 2023.

The three-finger salute from The Hunger Games films became the real-world symbol of the “Milk Tea Alliance,” a transnational solidarity network connecting pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In Myanmar after the February 2021 coup, Gen Z protesters combined this borrowed symbol with meme-culture sensibilities, creating signs with programming code as protest art and slogans like “I don’t want dictatorship, I just want boyfriend.”

Color coordination creates instant visual impact. The 1986 Philippines People Power Revolution is known as the “Yellow Revolution” because supporters of Corazon Aquino wore yellow and tied yellow ribbons everywhere—a reference to the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” that had become associated with her husband Ninoy’s imprisonment. When over two million people gathered along EDSA highway on February 22-25, 1986, the sea of yellow unified them visually while they offered flowers to soldiers and prayed the rosary.

South Korea’s candlelight protests created their own tradition: from October 2016 through March 2017, an estimated 16-17 million people participated in Saturday candlelight vigils demanding President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. The candles transformed nighttime protests into stunning visual spectacles that dominated news coverage.

Technology has expanded where and how messages appear

Guerrilla light projections represent one of the most significant innovations in displayed communications. During Occupy Wall Street’s November 17, 2011 Day of Action, activists projected “99% … Look around, you are part of a global uprising” onto the Verizon Building near the Brooklyn Bridge. The “bat signal” went viral globally, spawning a permanent projection activism unit called The Illuminator.

Washington D.C. artist Robin Bell has conducted over 50 projections on the Trump International Hotel alone, including “Pay Trump Bribes Here” (May 2017), “The President of the United States is a Known Racist and Nazi Sympathizer” after Charlottesville (August 2017), and “Shithole” with poop emojis after Trump’s comments about immigration (January 2018). His guerrilla technique uses custom-built projection racks on dollies with car battery power, allowing 30-minute sessions before moving on.

The legal status of projections makes them especially useful. D.C. Metropolitan Police confirmed they “will not engage in enforcement actions regarding light projections” unless a crime is indicated. As long as crews don’t block traffic or obstruct sidewalks, projections are legal. Banksy articulated the logic: “How illegal is it to vandalize a wall if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful?”

Hong Kong protesters pioneered several technological adaptations during the 2019 anti-extradition protests. “Lennon Walls” covered public surfaces with Post-It notes carrying messages of resistance. QR codes on signs linked to downloads of the Tor browser for mainland Chinese tourists to access uncensored internet. The Bridgefy app allowed peer-to-peer Bluetooth messaging when authorities jammed cell networks. And vertical banner drops from Lion Rock—a 50-meter yellow banner reading “No Extradition To PR China” in June 2019—accommodated traditional Chinese characters read top to bottom.

The Trump Baby balloon shows how ridicule travels

Three-dimensional protest objects can generate disproportionate media coverage. The six-meter-tall Trump Baby balloon—an inflatable depicting Trump as an angry orange baby in a diaper clutching a cell phone—first flew over Parliament Square on July 13, 2018 during Trump’s UK visit. Designer Matt Bonner and climate campaigner Leo Murray crowdfunded £16,000 for its creation.

The balloon’s power lay in ridicule rather than moral argument. “He doesn’t seem to be affected by the moral outrage,” organizers explained. “You can’t reason with him but you can ridicule him.” American activists raised $24,000 on GoFundMe to purchase six balloons and created a “Baby Trump Tour” for adoption by groups nationwide. The balloon appeared at Mar-a-Lago, in Chicago, New York, and Washington. The Museum of London acquired the original in January 2021 for its permanent protest collection.

This approach echoes the strategy of Chile’s 2019 protesters, who deployed costumed “Chilean Avengers” including “Baila Pikachu,” “Stupid and sensual Spiderman,” “Pareman,” and the beloved protest dog “Negro Matapacos.” The absurdity attracted cameras while communicating that ordinary people—not just professional activists—had joined the uprising.

Effective signs balance instant clarity with emotional resonance

Research on protest sign effectiveness reveals consistent principles. A 2024 eye-tracking study published in Frontiers in Political Science found that positive emotional images showing hope and enthusiasm more effectively mobilize participation than negative emotions. Longer visual attention to protest images amplifies their effects. This suggests that inspiring imagery may outperform graphic depictions of injustice.

Practical design advice converges on several points:

• High contrast is essential: Black-on-yellow, white-on-red, and black-on-orange mimic road signs and remain legible from a distance. Letters should have thick strokes, not thin ones.
• Test visibility by stepping back several feet from your sign before the event. What looks readable up close may blur at a distance.
• Keep messages short: Tony Kushner’s principle holds that protest signs should be shocking, clever, and immediately clear. A few words beat a paragraph.
• Consider your audience: Signs aimed at bystanders should be persuasive; signs aimed at fellow protesters can build morale; signs aimed at cameras should create shareable images.

Movement color coordination creates recognition across events. Iran’s 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising—sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody—spread the Kurdish slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” across 160+ cities in Iran’s 31 provinces and demonstrations in 80+ cities worldwide. Women cutting their hair and burning headscarves created powerful visual symbols that translated across languages.

Strategic placement determines how far a message travels

Location selection can multiply a message’s reach. Highway overpasses during morning commute, bridges with good photography sight lines, and spaces near media staging areas all increase visibility. The #BridgesNotWalls campaign on Trump’s inauguration day (January 20, 2017) demonstrated the power of coordinated placement: activists dropped banners from over 200 bridges across five continents simultaneously, including Tower Bridge, Auckland Harbour Bridge, and Germany’s Oberbaum Bridge. The global coordination became the story itself.

Banner drop tactics require technical knowledge. For large outdoor banners, cutting semi-circular wind flaps every 1.5-2 meters prevents the sail effect that can tear fabric or yank ropes from hands. Weights of 1-2 kilograms distributed along the bottom edge—often bean bags, tennis balls, or rice sewn into seams—keep banners readable. Mesh banners are safer for bridge drops because they allow wind through. Rolling banners from the bottom up ensures smooth unfurling when dropped.

Timing matters as much as location. Pre-dawn deployments can dominate morning news coverage. Coordinating with photographers ensures documentation. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 produced a permanent intervention: Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in enormous yellow letters on 16th Street leading to the White House—visible on satellite imagery—and officially renamed the block Black Lives Matter Plaza.

The law treats displayed communications as protected speech, with limits

In the United States, the First Amendment protects protest signs as symbolic speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that carrying signs with political messages, wearing armbands, and even burning flags constitute protected expression. However, authorities can impose “time, place, and manner” restrictions that are content-neutral, narrowly tailored to serve significant government interests, and leave open alternative channels of communication.

During the George W. Bush presidency, “Free Speech Zones” confined protesters to areas far from presidential events. When Brett Bursey refused to go to a designated zone half a mile away, police acknowledged his sign’s content was “the problem”—a revealing admission of viewpoint discrimination. The ACLU successfully challenged several such restrictions.

International contexts vary dramatically. Russia burned down independent bookshops stocking Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” Iran produced animated propaganda films denouncing Sharp. After the 2020 crackdown in Hong Kong under the National Security Law, protest banners became effectively criminal. In Myanmar, the military junta revoked media licenses and arrested protesters displaying the three-finger salute.

The impermanence of some displayed communications offers legal advantages. Projections cause no property damage. Yarn bombing—covering public objects with knitted coverings, pioneered by Magda Sayeg in Houston in the early 2000s—is non-destructive and easily removed. The KnitRiot Collective’s 2012 “HOMEsweetHOME” protest featured 99 hand-knitted houses hung in trees outside Bank of America, protesting the foreclosure crisis with an easily removable installation.

Collective creation builds movements beyond single events

Making banners together serves purposes beyond producing signs. The Protest Banner Lending Library in Chicago, founded by artist Aram Han Sifuentes, teaches banner-making through communal workshops and then lends completed banners to groups who need them. The project provides a way for people who cannot safely attend protests—undocumented immigrants, mothers with young children—to contribute. “Banners carry the histories of the hands that hold them,” Sifuentes explains.

Large banners typically require 12-20+ hours of work, making sign-making parties practical necessities. One Irish activist group’s banner-making session drew eight additional volunteers, allowing completion of two banners while building relationships for future actions. The South African Screen Training Project and Community Arts Project taught ordinary people silkscreen techniques, democratizing professional-quality poster production during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The Atelier Populaire’s rejection of individual credit reflected a political principle: that protest art belongs to the movement, not to artists seeking recognition. Their first poster declared: “Atelier Populaire: oui, Atelier Bourgeois: non.” This tradition continues in some contemporary movements. Many anti-apartheid posters were created anonymously to protect artists from the security police who killed 12 members of the Medu Art Ensemble in a 1985 raid on their Botswana headquarters.

From the Arab Spring to climate strikes, displayed communications evolve for each struggle

The Arab Spring demonstrated how a single slogan can unite millions across borders. “Al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām” (The people want to bring down the regime) echoed from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Syria. Protesters in Tunisia chanted “We are next, we are next, Ben Ali tell Mubarak he is next”—and then made it true. Within weeks, both dictators had fallen.

Greta Thunberg’s lone protest outside the Swedish Parliament on August 20, 2018 featured a hand-painted sign reading “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for climate). The simplicity became the point: any student could replicate it. By March 2019, over one million students participated in strikes across 125 countries. By September 2019, roughly four million protesters joined the largest climate demonstrations in history, including 1.4 million in Germany alone.

The Fridays for Future movement innovated during the COVID-19 pandemic with “ShoeStrikes”—leaving shoes in public spaces with messages nearby—and #ClimateStrikeOnline hashtags. The flexibility to maintain momentum when gatherings were impossible showed how displayed communications can adapt to any circumstance.

What makes displayed communications work in nonviolent struggles

Gene Sharp’s central insight was that political power derives from subjects’ obedience. Displayed communications work by spreading counter-narratives, rallying support, and communicating demands directly to audiences that authorities would prefer to remain uninformed. They function synergistically with other methods: displays of flags and symbolic colors (Method #18), slogans and caricatures (Method #7), and symbolic public acts that together build a visual vocabulary of resistance.

The most effective displayed communications share qualities across very different struggles: immediate legibility that conveys messages to hurried passersby; emotional resonance that inspires solidarity; design sophistication that attracts camera lenses; and enough symbolic depth to repay attention. They transform individual participants into a collective visual force while creating documentation that outlasts any single event.

Whether projected onto buildings from battery-powered carts, dropped from bridges at dawn, or hand-painted by a teenage girl outside parliament, displayed communications democratize political speech. They require no permission from editors, no approval from authorities, no capital beyond basic materials and labor. They claim public space for messages that power would prefer remain unspoken. And when they work—when “I AM A MAN” or “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” or “Skolstrejk för klimatet” captures a moment’s truth—they become permanent features of human memory, evidence that ordinary people can speak back to power and be heard.