Spotlight: Chaz Maviyane-Davies; Graphic design for justice.

When the controversial president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, announced in 2000 that elections would be held with just a month's notice for the opposition party to launch a campaign, graphic designer and Zimbabwean exile Chaz Maviyane-Davies began a month of "graphic activism." Each day, he created a politically charged poster to counter ensuing voter intimidation by Mugabe's government.

Maviyane-Davies's posters helped inspire an international community of support for fair elections in Zimbabwe. His works were posted daily to the website of the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change. They were also published in magazines and newspapers from South Africa to Sweden, made into screensavers, printed on t-shirts, and thrown out of the windows of trucks in parts of rural Zimbabwe where the threat of state-sponsored violence was high leading up to the elections. "I found it was also the only way to keep my sanity in the center of an absurd and dangerous situation," says Maviyane-Davies in his artist statement. An exile living in Boston since 2001, he is an associate professor of design at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Aiming to reclaim the power of the poster from corporate advertisers through "creative defiance," the 54-year-old designer creates posters that he believes will inspire hope for a ...